Seems I don't have time these days for much that requires much thought these days; odd, given that I haven't worked since early September. 
Your mistaking an aspect here, Venus's slow rotation is in all probability the cause for it's circumstances, not an irrelevant side factor, as is it's immense atmosphere. The surface temperature of venus is effectivelly isothermal, all well and good, dig 20 feet into the ground on most parts of Earth and you'll find it 58 deg Fahrenheit, regardless of time of year or day, effectively Isothermal, pretty much all celestial object in orbit around a star receiving most of their juice from that star have a given depth they become Isothermal or nearly so. In terms of mere day time flux, typically on Earth you only need to dig a foot or two down to get to a depth where temperature varies only with time of year and not with day. Venus has weather, it just doesn't have any variance of tmep at the surface, the atmosphere is massively thick.
All well and good, but temperature was the primary consideration here, not weather, which was only relevant to the extent it effected weather, which appears to be not much. In terms of temperature Venus evidently varies less from place to place than Earth, regardless of the fact that it has much longer days, so the negligible temperature differences will have a negigible impact on the amount of heat it retains.
Temperature on the surface, don't get to "Earthbound" in your thinking. You are trying to use Venus as an example of greenhouse effect analogous to Earth, to understand why it is not you have to understand the massive differences between them. Forget about Venus current status, it has virtually no axial tipping, it has a daytime that hast two months and receives twice the light, more than a hundred times as much energy hits it during a day. It's circumstances are viewed as a result of these factors, not disconnected.
The length of its days seems to be irrelevant, though obviously its greater proximity to the sun has a big impact, and I was careless to not consider that more closely (as I've conceded). I suspect atmospheric temperatures vary less than on Earth, too, though I confess I don't know, beyond the fact that it doesn't sound like temperatures vary much anywhere on Venus (and if that's caused by atmospheric pressure I see no reason it wouldn't apply to said atmosphere as well) and that atmospheric temperatures here can vary a great deal even at different altitudes above the same location. Maybe I'm being careless again, but it's an oblate spheroid; its axial tilt shouldn't appreciably impact how much radation it receives from another oblate spheroid, and I'm not following how it would impact radiation retained at all.
When they're that large and in regards to blackbody radiation? Yes, but the example was merely for ease of mental absorption. Blackbody radiation is strictly a matter of temperature, were we to redo those instead with only two globes, one of constant temp and one that was +/- the same tmep from that we'd have gotten the same values, cut in half in terms of output from the lower total surface area but same in ratio.
Assuming that by "lower total surface area" you mean of each side of the cold/hot sphere rather than that spheres total surface are, I'm with you. That covers radiation, which I think is probably the biggest issue in heat retention, but conduction and convection still seem fairly irrelevant to that retention. Reflection and absorbtion still seem much bigger issues, and that's the very area where greenhouse gasses play their huge role in determining how much radiation the planet retains and how much is bounced back into space. To borrow your stirred coffee analogy, it'll cool faster if agitated than not, but if it's being microwaved you'll have to stir it pretty fast just to slow the rate at which it continues heating, and it'll continue heating until it boils or you shut off the microwave, whatever else you do. Put another way, a warmer body radiates heat at a greater rate than a cooler one, but that fails to explain why it was warmer in the first place.
The total effect of magnetic fields on weather are not known, evidence a this time is inconclusive as to weather magnetic pole switches or movement cause climate change, though last I checked it was felt that it probably did not significantly. But that was in regards change pole location. As stated, it keeps various particles out, those particles not only would bring in heat but also would tend to have chemical effects when they struck, a parallel being the effect of sunlight on oxygen/ozone.
In other words we really don't know, and science is only willing to speculate on specifics about polar shifts, where it probably has no impact. A magnetic field whose impact is unknown and not thought significant to the extent it is known isn't much of a counterargument. Unless we're awash in a disproportionate number of positive rather than negative particles (or vice versa), for everyone a given pole repels it should attract another, so over time it should be a zero sum game.
I believe it has been shown that a 100% CO2 atmosphere on Earth would not cause water to boil, but I can't recall where I saw that to link an analysis, regardless, keep in mind that a rise in CO2 will not cause it to become 100% Co2. The Earth's Atmosphere weighs about 5 Billion Megatons. Last I checked world annual CO2 output is around 30,000 megatons, we do leak some air into the void but as pressure rises boiling point of water does too, and of course it take a lot more energy to boil water than it does to get it up there from ice. Not that 90C water would be particularly fun either.
I don't expect a 100% CO2 atmosphere or anything near it, no. I'd be surprised if there's twice as much oxygen as carbon available on Earth, and even if there is there are too many metals oxygen much prefers anyway, while carbon loves forming high energy covalent bonds with everything. However, we're already seeing multiple degree temperature increases just from CO2 increases in the parts per million range. Even playing the "cities retain more heat than countryside" game doesn't exactly relieve humanity of responsibility for that. Instead we have to play the "it's a natural but previously unknown cycle for which we have no evidence, only our eagerness to avoid responsibility". Too bad avoiding responsibility doesn't equal avoiding consequences....
If you ever stumble on that link again I'd love to see it, btw, but, as you say, we'd be screwed a long time before the oceans boiled. Saline content would keep the oceans liquid longer than the rivers, too, but that's not really the point: It's about temperature (energy levels, ultimately, as you know) and state changes are only a symptom of that. When you've already gone from 0 to 79.8 degrees I don't really consider the last 20 "a lot more". Obviously, 80% of the work has been done already, and since that's a little over 40 degrees hotter than our body temperature, no, it's not a particularly appealing option.
The difficulty here is that where 'carbon' is concerned these days people's scientific opinion seems governed by their politics, more than the other way around, and neither is strictly appropriate but the latter is a bit more acceptable. You assuming something 'must be done' but the flip side of the coin is that there are a lot of us who think that 'something' should be figuring out what is being done, and then figuring out the the actual problem that needs a solution. I frankly consider the long-range threat minimal, because it seems to have some fairly nice silver linings and the actual thunderbolt seems addressable, and I really am not convinced any truly extreme effect will occur.
You know I love attaching "seems" and other such qualifiers to unverifiable beliefs and impressions, but when we're talking about the climate of the only currently habitable planet you're rolling some pretty big dice. I know you consider the long range threat minimal; I don't, and, once again, the consequences if I'm right and you're wrong are a lot greater than if you're right and I'm wrong.
I didn't say a word about Climategate and the only thought I gave it when writing what I did say was to note to myself in passing that I should use the word "reputable" to make clear I WASN'T talking about the disreputable scientists involved in it. Concealing data is bad science, plain and simple, and I've never disputed that. This is the biggest problem with Climategate though, and, frankly, the kind of cart-before-the-horse logic that is my impression of this subthread: Climategate is represented as the basis for claims that the entire climatology community has been cooking the books for decades, despite the fact that
1) Those claims had been around for decades before Climategate,
2) the data withheld in Climategate only indicated still evident temperature increases weren't growing as FAST as first thought and
3) there's no evidence of any other gamesmanship even as minimal as that with the data.
Climategate was STILL bad science, but it's hardly surprising that decades of purely political and business interests seeking some evidence for their running refrain of dishonest conspiracy finally found some group of climatologists somewhere who'd done something unethical. That would be like Bertrand Russell saying Jim Bakker exposed all of Christianity as a sham: He dismissed Christianity decades before Bakker was born, so that wasn't the cause, Bakkers violation of one Christian tenet isn't a repudiation of all of them, and even if it were the actions of a few individuals can't be taken to represent the actions and motives of millions of others. If you can say the Corrupt Bargain of 1876 and Lee Atwater aren't representative of the GOP I ought to be able to disavow the people in Climategate, don't you think?
No, I don't think the people involved with Climategate were slandered, as such, (the EFFECT, but not the ETHICS, of what they did has been VASTLY overstated, IMHO) but an isolated event in the last few years doesn't prove decades old allegations of fraud and conspiracy.
Skepticism means proceeding in the most rationale fashion base don available evidence. In my opinion there is no need to 'hedge our bets', fossils fuels are limited resource and unable to indefinitely meet our growing energy concerns alone, that is sufficient reason for me to support research and development of more efficient devices and alternate energy sources, I of course need no reason to support the former, efficiency is always good, and industry tends to strive for it rather enthusiastically
You are right that 'hedging ones bets' is wise, but only in total context, were we to adopt all the policies the greens want, we'd lay more misery down on the world then both World Wars combined.
And people say I'm hyperbolic....
Ultimately, skepticism just means taking nothing unproven for granted, but the actions stemming from that view are what matter here. I don't think adopting "all the policies the greens want" would return us to some Hobbesian Paleolithic, 'cos I happen to consider myself very much a green, and don't think (for example) fission power will destroy the world. Yeah, there are plenty of fanatics out there--on both sides. I'll make you a deal: If you don't assume I'm a Luddite who wants to live in trees I won't assume you're James Watt back from the dead to tell us global warming and Peak Oil don't matter since Jesus will be back to end the world next week.
I'm realistic enough to see that large scale greenhouse gas emissions are unlikely to be reduced any time soon without a large scale expansion of renewable clean energy, and that any global climate change treaties will quickly be useless if they don't hold China and India as accountable as they do the West. We're the biggest greenhouse gas producers now, but that will change within the decade, at which point starving and impoverishing ourselves won't do anything but increase our suffering while enriching countries who don't follow suit. That and Peak Oil are the biggest reasons I support the construction of fission power plants on a large scale (I think it's about the only point on which I still agree with Obama, or rather, where he still agrees with his campaign platform and me).
I doubt the (other) greens will be a long term problem; their influence on nukes is rapidly diminished and still waning. The Dem leadership ultimately no more interested in their fringes goals than the GOP leadership, they just feign otherwise for votes. The people you'll have to convince are the energy and automotive companies, primarily the former, which is why I think even though most business leaders see the advantages of reducing, reusing, recycling AND alternative energy, none of it was going to happen while we had oil barons for President and VP. The only way to get the energy industry on board with renewable energy is to promise they'll control it, because they have zero interest in CHEAP energy, which leaves the world at their nonexistent mercy. The biggest obstacle to new American fission plants has been that necessary safety regulations make oil and gas more profitable for energy companies, but we need only look to Texas City and Deepwater Horizon to see what a bad idea it would be to forego regulations or their enforcement just to give energy companies a monetary incentive for responsibility. You can't give Exxon a blank check, but they won't relinquish their energy oligopoly without another to replace it.
I advise you too look up how much tundra there is, and remember that Antartica is actually a whole continent.
I neither neglected nor forgot that, but I don't think it would make up for the amount of equatorial Africa, Asia and the Americas we'd lose.
Because water begins evaporating a long time before it boils (and because of weather and geology; it gets pretty hot in Death Valley, the Outback and the Sahara, but there's not much rain).
Let's just say I'm not unaware with aquaponics and leave it at that....
That all sounds great, and is definitely worth pursuing, but if we had the efficiency to so radically alter emerging hot dry regions we'd have already done it to existing ones. Again, I'm all for it, but you'll have to convince neither radical nor reasonable greens but the captains of industry so enamored of efficiency. Mass produced fertilizer has been around for decades and irrigation for centuries, but their availability in places like Ethiopia has been limited, largely because manufacturing fertilizer and installing irrigation isn't usually done for charity. I don't expect to irrigate and farm newly heated and exposed land any better than our current hot arid land. The Green Revolution was all well and good--if you could afford the industrialization on which it was founded. I see no reason todays promises to the undeveloped world are more likely to be fulfilled than past ones.
Sure, hotter temps mean more rain, provided the temperature doesn't rise above waters boiling point, but wetter poles at the cost of equatorial regions with rare brief rains due to evaporation lose more than they gain. Rain forests alone cover about half as much as area as all of Antartica (much of which is mountainous beneath the ice anyway) will become uninhabitable for man long before they run out of water. I'm freezing now, but the same principle I applied in TX holds: I can always bundle more to conserve heat, but I can only "unbundle" so much if it's too hot. I'm just not convinced there are more places on Earth too cold for habitation without perpetual shelter than too hot, and your proposed solution sounds like a domed ecosystem. Reckon I'll see you on Mars....
Covered some of that above, but one points out that when land sink below sea level it does not actually become 'sea', dikes can be constructed. Those areas get hit so hard not simply because their weather suck but because they are simply under-developed and horribly ruled. And Coastal populations shift all the time, the shoreline is not and never has been static, houses are typically only built to last 20-50 years before maintenance cost exceeds construction cost. Cities are not even fixed locations, they tend to migrate, and we already know how to preserve shoreline when necessary.
Mass global migration will solve the problem? Are you aware that a significant portion of America wants to build an inpenetrable wall along its southern border to prevent that? That's a recipe for myriad wars on a scale not seen since the ancient world; hardly a selling point. You know enough engineering to know there are limits to what dikes and levees can do; you can't just keep building them higher and higher because the weight of the water will simply become too great. We're talking oceans here, not Lake Mead; underdeveloped and horribly ruled places like the Netherlands and Venice would be wiped off the map. Although every estimate I've found looks about the same you might trust this one more than others. Four hundred million people living on the coast, a number this article claims will grow to nearly 3 billion within fifteen years. That's a lot of people to move, house and feed; if we opt for that approach expect a Malthusian field day.
I am aware of the basic thermodynamics of water Joel
Then start acting like it?
Seems to depend on what charts you examine. People, especially in underdeveloped areas, tend to move toward water sources; always have and probably always will. The second article linked above argues that trend will grow rather than diminish in the next decades due to resource demand and scarcity. : People living on freshwater sources may face either flooding or deserts, depending on the extent and particulars of climate change, and you can add them to the half billion already in real danger if ocean levels continue rising. You may not care if the living space shrinks, but those people won't just grow gills: They'll find new places to live, and odds are good those places will be occupied by other people who won't grow gills either. Remember, Movement comes before Resolve Conflict (Remove Excess Population).
That's the politics overriding the reason. You view 'the powers that be' as an enemy with selfish motives and ill-intent, I do not. I have noticed that that tends to be the driving force in most people's views on the matter. I consider a robust, industrialized economy as better equipped to handles this problem or any others which may pop up, and most of the solutions proposed by the greens that are not already things industry required little encouragement to adopt as threats to that. I think most greens view us as ripping down our house to keep the fire going so we don't freeze to death while ignoring the gaping whole we're putting in the walls and roof, from my perspective, adopting things which damage the economy is the same thing. Some people wish to meet this 'crisis' with a singular solution they feel addresses all the problems of society that they see, typically massive economic redistribution and a lot of times some return to an idolized past. Reasonable, sane measures are better, I tend to think our 'greedy leaders' are actually pretty good about doing this, whereas I tend to feel most of the enviro-types are bound and determined to take us down a road paved with little carbon friendly bricks scribed with the words 'good intentions'
Yeah, see above.
"Where there is no vision, the people persih", I've heard. Most business leaders today seem woefully short sighted as well as selfish. Thus new CEOs can sell assets and fire workers to raise revenue and lower overhead, resulting in higher profits that allow them to deploy golden parachutes and cash out inflated stock before anyone realizes an unsustainable shell company is all that remains. We need not a singular but a comprehensive, multifaceted and sustainable solution. As long as problems are reduced to competing and conflicting interests little progress is possible without some authoritarian system (dubious progress), because "solutions" benefiting one group at the expense of the rest are (rightly) impossible in any democracy.
Personally, I think extremism is at least as dangerous in socioeconomics as in politics specifically, hence I favor socialism over both pure capitalism and pure communism (and I'd like to note in passing that socialism not only doesn't eliminate capitalism, it requires it). We don't need Luddite tree huggers, but also shouldn't pave the Earth and live in a manufactured ecosystem. Quite simply, we're not freaking smart or infallible enough to pull that off and anyone who tells you differently needs to reexamine all human history. Ideally I'd want to maintain a certain industrial baseline rather than trying to eliminate OR maximize it (ironically, a lot of the West is already moving this way) because a basic tenet of industrialization is that there comes a point of marginal returns.
We don't have to mass produce everything, and often it's not even advantageous. Ironically, that's more like the OTHER Civlization game, where I used to sell manufacturing plants in cities that didn't produce six shields, because the six gold it cost to maintain the plant made it a net loss. In a world with diminishing fossil fuels and electricity sources, making things by hand rather than machine, growing and buying food locally, etc. will increasingly be more cost effective than manufacturing everything you don't have shipped in from the other side of the world. Some things will still require manufacture; I can't handmake an artificial heart or refrigerator. However, an economy with 300 million artificial heart makers is an unsustainable America, and we're starting to see the practical truth of that. Past time we said farewell to the Scylla and Charybdis of Luddites and mechanophiles as well as of laissez-faire and communism.
I'm pretty sure this is the longest response I've ever made; if not, it's darned close, and since it's almost 5AM here I'm won't even try to edit it further. That's not a rebuke; 'twas a team effort, after all, and of a type I enjoy, but it took me five hours, which is also why I waited so long to respond: I KNEW it would take a while to do provide the response you deserved. Hopefully it didn't disappoint. The main thing is 1) we don't know if the doomsday scenarios are justified, 2) there's a middle road between total and nonexistent industrialization and 3) we need a comprehensive and sustainable long term solution that attacks this and all our socioeconomic problems on every front. Doesn't have to be some global government, and would be better if it weren't, but it does need to be highly integrated locally and globally.
In that case the issue of a given side being exposed to the sun for a given time far longer than the other seems no issue at all: Temps are the same on both sides, so whether a planet with a very hot/cold side retains more heat than one where the two frequently switch orientations is moot.
Your mistaking an aspect here, Venus's slow rotation is in all probability the cause for it's circumstances, not an irrelevant side factor, as is it's immense atmosphere. The surface temperature of venus is effectivelly isothermal, all well and good, dig 20 feet into the ground on most parts of Earth and you'll find it 58 deg Fahrenheit, regardless of time of year or day, effectively Isothermal, pretty much all celestial object in orbit around a star receiving most of their juice from that star have a given depth they become Isothermal or nearly so. In terms of mere day time flux, typically on Earth you only need to dig a foot or two down to get to a depth where temperature varies only with time of year and not with day. Venus has weather, it just doesn't have any variance of tmep at the surface, the atmosphere is massively thick.
All well and good, but temperature was the primary consideration here, not weather, which was only relevant to the extent it effected weather, which appears to be not much. In terms of temperature Venus evidently varies less from place to place than Earth, regardless of the fact that it has much longer days, so the negligible temperature differences will have a negigible impact on the amount of heat it retains.
A LOT of this seems irrelevant if there's no significant difference between the un/lit sides of Venus; I'm beginning to wonder why you even mentioned the longer days if the greater pressure means they have even less effect on temperature variations than our own 24 hour days.
Temperature on the surface, don't get to "Earthbound" in your thinking. You are trying to use Venus as an example of greenhouse effect analogous to Earth, to understand why it is not you have to understand the massive differences between them. Forget about Venus current status, it has virtually no axial tipping, it has a daytime that hast two months and receives twice the light, more than a hundred times as much energy hits it during a day. It's circumstances are viewed as a result of these factors, not disconnected.
The length of its days seems to be irrelevant, though obviously its greater proximity to the sun has a big impact, and I was careless to not consider that more closely (as I've conceded). I suspect atmospheric temperatures vary less than on Earth, too, though I confess I don't know, beyond the fact that it doesn't sound like temperatures vary much anywhere on Venus (and if that's caused by atmospheric pressure I see no reason it wouldn't apply to said atmosphere as well) and that atmospheric temperatures here can vary a great deal even at different altitudes above the same location. Maybe I'm being careless again, but it's an oblate spheroid; its axial tilt shouldn't appreciably impact how much radation it receives from another oblate spheroid, and I'm not following how it would impact radiation retained at all.
I've bent a few pieces of wire in my day, and I know what happens; I can't recall ever spinning in circles while doing so, so I can't be sure that wouldn't make a difference, but if there is one that analogy fails to demonstrate it. Likewise, convections effects on heat transfer within the planet are irrelevant if pressure is already maintaining an essentially constant temperature across the globe. Regarding the example, is it really accurate to treat the cold and hot sides of a globe as if they were two separate bodies? I'm not convinced albedo is a sidetrack at all, but since heat radiated from planets is almost entirely heat they first absorbed (minus things like the heat of gravity compressing its mass) I was thinking a lot about it and reflected heat from the start.
When they're that large and in regards to blackbody radiation? Yes, but the example was merely for ease of mental absorption. Blackbody radiation is strictly a matter of temperature, were we to redo those instead with only two globes, one of constant temp and one that was +/- the same tmep from that we'd have gotten the same values, cut in half in terms of output from the lower total surface area but same in ratio.
Assuming that by "lower total surface area" you mean of each side of the cold/hot sphere rather than that spheres total surface are, I'm with you. That covers radiation, which I think is probably the biggest issue in heat retention, but conduction and convection still seem fairly irrelevant to that retention. Reflection and absorbtion still seem much bigger issues, and that's the very area where greenhouse gasses play their huge role in determining how much radiation the planet retains and how much is bounced back into space. To borrow your stirred coffee analogy, it'll cool faster if agitated than not, but if it's being microwaved you'll have to stir it pretty fast just to slow the rate at which it continues heating, and it'll continue heating until it boils or you shut off the microwave, whatever else you do. Put another way, a warmer body radiates heat at a greater rate than a cooler one, but that fails to explain why it was warmer in the first place.
Maybe it's just because I'm the Tangent King, but saying your analysis "doesn't even include the effect" a magnetic field and rotation have on weather seems more like an allusion to an allusion than actually covering it. I'm not asking for a geo or astrophysics primer here, but you're not giving me much reason to consider the magnetic fields effect on Earths heat loss beyond the friction between it and the solar wind or a flare.
The total effect of magnetic fields on weather are not known, evidence a this time is inconclusive as to weather magnetic pole switches or movement cause climate change, though last I checked it was felt that it probably did not significantly. But that was in regards change pole location. As stated, it keeps various particles out, those particles not only would bring in heat but also would tend to have chemical effects when they struck, a parallel being the effect of sunlight on oxygen/ozone.
In other words we really don't know, and science is only willing to speculate on specifics about polar shifts, where it probably has no impact. A magnetic field whose impact is unknown and not thought significant to the extent it is known isn't much of a counterargument. Unless we're awash in a disproportionate number of positive rather than negative particles (or vice versa), for everyone a given pole repels it should attract another, so over time it should be a zero sum game.
Yeah, I know the law, just hadn't stopped to think that Venus really is that much closer to the sun; my bad there. Whether or not I'm understanding the preceding properly, that alone should make an apple to apples comparison impossible. Of course, since water boils a long time before lead melts, it doesn't let us off the hook either.
I believe it has been shown that a 100% CO2 atmosphere on Earth would not cause water to boil, but I can't recall where I saw that to link an analysis, regardless, keep in mind that a rise in CO2 will not cause it to become 100% Co2. The Earth's Atmosphere weighs about 5 Billion Megatons. Last I checked world annual CO2 output is around 30,000 megatons, we do leak some air into the void but as pressure rises boiling point of water does too, and of course it take a lot more energy to boil water than it does to get it up there from ice. Not that 90C water would be particularly fun either.
I don't expect a 100% CO2 atmosphere or anything near it, no. I'd be surprised if there's twice as much oxygen as carbon available on Earth, and even if there is there are too many metals oxygen much prefers anyway, while carbon loves forming high energy covalent bonds with everything. However, we're already seeing multiple degree temperature increases just from CO2 increases in the parts per million range. Even playing the "cities retain more heat than countryside" game doesn't exactly relieve humanity of responsibility for that. Instead we have to play the "it's a natural but previously unknown cycle for which we have no evidence, only our eagerness to avoid responsibility". Too bad avoiding responsibility doesn't equal avoiding consequences....
If you ever stumble on that link again I'd love to see it, btw, but, as you say, we'd be screwed a long time before the oceans boiled. Saline content would keep the oceans liquid longer than the rivers, too, but that's not really the point: It's about temperature (energy levels, ultimately, as you know) and state changes are only a symptom of that. When you've already gone from 0 to 79.8 degrees I don't really consider the last 20 "a lot more". Obviously, 80% of the work has been done already, and since that's a little over 40 degrees hotter than our body temperature, no, it's not a particularly appealing option.
I'm not saying we're identical though, just that Venus provides us an excellent example of how a runaway greenhouse effect really can have dire consequences, despite the claims of those who insist it doesn't matter even if it IS happening here. Too much of that, hell, too much of US policy in general these days, strike me as a rationalized excuse to do nothing, with the incidental effect that those who materially benefit from doing nothing continue doing so. And accuse reputable scientists of bias and greed.
The difficulty here is that where 'carbon' is concerned these days people's scientific opinion seems governed by their politics, more than the other way around, and neither is strictly appropriate but the latter is a bit more acceptable. You assuming something 'must be done' but the flip side of the coin is that there are a lot of us who think that 'something' should be figuring out what is being done, and then figuring out the the actual problem that needs a solution. I frankly consider the long-range threat minimal, because it seems to have some fairly nice silver linings and the actual thunderbolt seems addressable, and I really am not convinced any truly extreme effect will occur.
You know I love attaching "seems" and other such qualifiers to unverifiable beliefs and impressions, but when we're talking about the climate of the only currently habitable planet you're rolling some pretty big dice. I know you consider the long range threat minimal; I don't, and, once again, the consequences if I'm right and you're wrong are a lot greater than if you're right and I'm wrong.
Your take on the Climategate issue I will have to bypass, I do not believe the accused were innocent or slandered. Nor do I now wish to hear the moans from those who for years have slandered every skeptic on the various Green fads as fools, religious fanatics, or greedy corporate hacks. After decades of that crap over nuclear matters we are only now get a few vague half-ass apologies for all the shit we took for years of telling people to relax.
I didn't say a word about Climategate and the only thought I gave it when writing what I did say was to note to myself in passing that I should use the word "reputable" to make clear I WASN'T talking about the disreputable scientists involved in it. Concealing data is bad science, plain and simple, and I've never disputed that. This is the biggest problem with Climategate though, and, frankly, the kind of cart-before-the-horse logic that is my impression of this subthread: Climategate is represented as the basis for claims that the entire climatology community has been cooking the books for decades, despite the fact that
1) Those claims had been around for decades before Climategate,
2) the data withheld in Climategate only indicated still evident temperature increases weren't growing as FAST as first thought and
3) there's no evidence of any other gamesmanship even as minimal as that with the data.
Climategate was STILL bad science, but it's hardly surprising that decades of purely political and business interests seeking some evidence for their running refrain of dishonest conspiracy finally found some group of climatologists somewhere who'd done something unethical. That would be like Bertrand Russell saying Jim Bakker exposed all of Christianity as a sham: He dismissed Christianity decades before Bakker was born, so that wasn't the cause, Bakkers violation of one Christian tenet isn't a repudiation of all of them, and even if it were the actions of a few individuals can't be taken to represent the actions and motives of millions of others. If you can say the Corrupt Bargain of 1876 and Lee Atwater aren't representative of the GOP I ought to be able to disavow the people in Climategate, don't you think?
No, I don't think the people involved with Climategate were slandered, as such, (the EFFECT, but not the ETHICS, of what they did has been VASTLY overstated, IMHO) but an isolated event in the last few years doesn't prove decades old allegations of fraud and conspiracy.Sure, but skepticism doesn't equal inaction, in fact, it actually means you hedge your bets, which is what taking steps to reduce our undeniably and dramatically increased CO2 emissions in the last two centuries would be. Setting that aside for the moment, however, I can think of several HUGE downsides to ignoring accurate predictions of significant warming:
Skepticism means proceeding in the most rationale fashion base don available evidence. In my opinion there is no need to 'hedge our bets', fossils fuels are limited resource and unable to indefinitely meet our growing energy concerns alone, that is sufficient reason for me to support research and development of more efficient devices and alternate energy sources, I of course need no reason to support the former, efficiency is always good, and industry tends to strive for it rather enthusiastically
You are right that 'hedging ones bets' is wise, but only in total context, were we to adopt all the policies the greens want, we'd lay more misery down on the world then both World Wars combined.
And people say I'm hyperbolic....
Ultimately, skepticism just means taking nothing unproven for granted, but the actions stemming from that view are what matter here. I don't think adopting "all the policies the greens want" would return us to some Hobbesian Paleolithic, 'cos I happen to consider myself very much a green, and don't think (for example) fission power will destroy the world. Yeah, there are plenty of fanatics out there--on both sides. I'll make you a deal: If you don't assume I'm a Luddite who wants to live in trees I won't assume you're James Watt back from the dead to tell us global warming and Peak Oil don't matter since Jesus will be back to end the world next week.
I'm realistic enough to see that large scale greenhouse gas emissions are unlikely to be reduced any time soon without a large scale expansion of renewable clean energy, and that any global climate change treaties will quickly be useless if they don't hold China and India as accountable as they do the West. We're the biggest greenhouse gas producers now, but that will change within the decade, at which point starving and impoverishing ourselves won't do anything but increase our suffering while enriching countries who don't follow suit. That and Peak Oil are the biggest reasons I support the construction of fission power plants on a large scale (I think it's about the only point on which I still agree with Obama, or rather, where he still agrees with his campaign platform and me).
I doubt the (other) greens will be a long term problem; their influence on nukes is rapidly diminished and still waning. The Dem leadership ultimately no more interested in their fringes goals than the GOP leadership, they just feign otherwise for votes. The people you'll have to convince are the energy and automotive companies, primarily the former, which is why I think even though most business leaders see the advantages of reducing, reusing, recycling AND alternative energy, none of it was going to happen while we had oil barons for President and VP. The only way to get the energy industry on board with renewable energy is to promise they'll control it, because they have zero interest in CHEAP energy, which leaves the world at their nonexistent mercy. The biggest obstacle to new American fission plants has been that necessary safety regulations make oil and gas more profitable for energy companies, but we need only look to Texas City and Deepwater Horizon to see what a bad idea it would be to forego regulations or their enforcement just to give energy companies a monetary incentive for responsibility. You can't give Exxon a blank check, but they won't relinquish their energy oligopoly without another to replace it.
First and foremost, I can walk from the Prime Meridian to the International Dateline a lot faster in Antartica than I can in Guatemala: The amount of tundra we'll reclaim is dwarfed by the amount of equatorial land that would become uninhabitable desert.
I advise you too look up how much tundra there is, and remember that Antartica is actually a whole continent.
I neither neglected nor forgot that, but I don't think it would make up for the amount of equatorial Africa, Asia and the Americas we'd lose.
Second, why would those places become desert?
Because water begins evaporating a long time before it boils (and because of weather and geology; it gets pretty hot in Death Valley, the Outback and the Sahara, but there's not much rain).
Hotter temps mean more rain, it will doubtless not be evenly spread, but on average it should be, and these effects would not happen overnight, we are talking decades, further, you seem to ignore that we have become very advanced at techniques to protect areas from becoming desert, we've made massive advances in arid agriculture as well and even developed some nifty ways to turns coastal deserts into high producing land, renewable passive solar desalinization and agriculture facilities. We will doubtless continue to improve those techniques. But again, do a logic check, the total rainfall will increase if temperature rises, there is no particular reason to assume places will get less rainfall, most places will get more, if weather patterns begin to shift, well they do do that from time to time, it is not particularly labor intensive to adjust ecology over a few decades to match the new local norm. In terms of deserts, well, frankly polycarbonate is not that expensive, as greenhouses they tend to represent a better long-term capital investment then switching to, say, solar panels, and for that matter more volatile weather would probably make windmills more cost effective. Green-tinted polycarbonate runs about $50,000 an acre for the material itself, and would reflect green light, useless to plants, right back up into the atmosphere in desert regions, and they have no meaningful water loss which can be resupplied with saltwater anyway instead of fresh water. Greenhouses produce far more calories per square foot than any other method anyway. It's entirely possible agriculture will switch entirely away from open air just because there are a lot of emerging economic advantages to having your whole 'field' contained inside a place where irrigation is unnecessary, there is no soil erosion and loss, and you can pump tons of CO2 into it. I think you'd feel a lot better about this whole thing if you spent some time researching greenhouses and emerging aquaponics technology.
Let's just say I'm not unaware with aquaponics and leave it at that....
That all sounds great, and is definitely worth pursuing, but if we had the efficiency to so radically alter emerging hot dry regions we'd have already done it to existing ones. Again, I'm all for it, but you'll have to convince neither radical nor reasonable greens but the captains of industry so enamored of efficiency. Mass produced fertilizer has been around for decades and irrigation for centuries, but their availability in places like Ethiopia has been limited, largely because manufacturing fertilizer and installing irrigation isn't usually done for charity. I don't expect to irrigate and farm newly heated and exposed land any better than our current hot arid land. The Green Revolution was all well and good--if you could afford the industrialization on which it was founded. I see no reason todays promises to the undeveloped world are more likely to be fulfilled than past ones.
Sure, hotter temps mean more rain, provided the temperature doesn't rise above waters boiling point, but wetter poles at the cost of equatorial regions with rare brief rains due to evaporation lose more than they gain. Rain forests alone cover about half as much as area as all of Antartica (much of which is mountainous beneath the ice anyway) will become uninhabitable for man long before they run out of water. I'm freezing now, but the same principle I applied in TX holds: I can always bundle more to conserve heat, but I can only "unbundle" so much if it's too hot. I'm just not convinced there are more places on Earth too cold for habitation without perpetual shelter than too hot, and your proposed solution sounds like a domed ecosystem. Reckon I'll see you on Mars....
In addition, not only do very few people live on that tundra now, but a LOT of people live in those equatorial regions. I don't think you'll be able to sell Brazil on global warming by telling them all to move to Canada (for that matter, it might make Canada a hard sell, too. ) That brings us to another problem: A disproportionate amount of the worlds population lives near the coast, and even more of it lives near SOME source of water, fresh or salt, and the best part is it's often the most impoverished and therefore least capable of adapting to drastic climate change. If the oceans rise and the Himalayas flood the Ganges India is in a very bad way, and the solution is not to move into the Himalayas; lukewarm barren rock is still barren rock. Until/unless equatorial temperatures reached the point where rainfall was rare, the monsoon rains resulting from the melting glaciers would be brutal as well. For coastal populations (which is a LOT of people) any sea level rise is dangerous, because water always finds its level: A sea level rise of just a few inches could permanently drive the shoreline 50 miles inland. The question isn't how much of FL is above sea level now, but how FAR, and for most of it the answer is "not very".
) That brings us to another problem: A disproportionate amount of the worlds population lives near the coast, and even more of it lives near SOME source of water, fresh or salt, and the best part is it's often the most impoverished and therefore least capable of adapting to drastic climate change. If the oceans rise and the Himalayas flood the Ganges India is in a very bad way, and the solution is not to move into the Himalayas; lukewarm barren rock is still barren rock. Until/unless equatorial temperatures reached the point where rainfall was rare, the monsoon rains resulting from the melting glaciers would be brutal as well. For coastal populations (which is a LOT of people) any sea level rise is dangerous, because water always finds its level: A sea level rise of just a few inches could permanently drive the shoreline 50 miles inland. The question isn't how much of FL is above sea level now, but how FAR, and for most of it the answer is "not very".Covered some of that above, but one points out that when land sink below sea level it does not actually become 'sea', dikes can be constructed. Those areas get hit so hard not simply because their weather suck but because they are simply under-developed and horribly ruled. And Coastal populations shift all the time, the shoreline is not and never has been static, houses are typically only built to last 20-50 years before maintenance cost exceeds construction cost. Cities are not even fixed locations, they tend to migrate, and we already know how to preserve shoreline when necessary.
Mass global migration will solve the problem? Are you aware that a significant portion of America wants to build an inpenetrable wall along its southern border to prevent that? That's a recipe for myriad wars on a scale not seen since the ancient world; hardly a selling point. You know enough engineering to know there are limits to what dikes and levees can do; you can't just keep building them higher and higher because the weight of the water will simply become too great. We're talking oceans here, not Lake Mead; underdeveloped and horribly ruled places like the Netherlands and Venice would be wiped off the map. Although every estimate I've found looks about the same you might trust this one more than others. Four hundred million people living on the coast, a number this article claims will grow to nearly 3 billion within fifteen years. That's a lot of people to move, house and feed; if we opt for that approach expect a Malthusian field day.
Then there's the ice caps. I try not to think about the ice caps, because they act like a natural thermostat, absorbing a great deal of heat when they melt, then accumulating frozen precipitation when temperatures drop. You know the drill: Until the ice melts it can't get above 0 centigrade, and it takes almost as much heat to accomplish that state change with NO temperature increase as it does to boil the water once it's melted. So long as there's snow on the ground here even the ambient temperature won't get more than a degree or two above freezing, and the ground will remain frozen throughout that time. Once the last of it's gone though there's nothing to absorb that heat in a state change: More energy means higher temperatures, period. Well, until we reach the point where all the water turns to steam, but one way or the other that won't be a problem for humans....
I am aware of the basic thermodynamics of water Joel
Then start acting like it?
While I personally dislike the heat, plants don't. I don't really care what happens to people's living space so long as the net amount of arable land does not diminish, we (developed countries) only use about 2% of the pop to grow food, our big-ass cities can easily be diked or moved. We don't build buildings to last for centuries, but for decades. If you look at population density charts moving over decade span the whole of humanity ebbs and wanders around the map like crazy.
Seems to depend on what charts you examine. People, especially in underdeveloped areas, tend to move toward water sources; always have and probably always will. The second article linked above argues that trend will grow rather than diminish in the next decades due to resource demand and scarcity. : People living on freshwater sources may face either flooding or deserts, depending on the extent and particulars of climate change, and you can add them to the half billion already in real danger if ocean levels continue rising. You may not care if the living space shrinks, but those people won't just grow gills: They'll find new places to live, and odds are good those places will be occupied by other people who won't grow gills either. Remember, Movement comes before Resolve Conflict (Remove Excess Population).
It really doesn't matter though. Whatever part of the current socio-economic system we look at that those running it have little incentive and thus little desire to change anything, so they'll continue to find reasons why they not only can but MUST do nothing. It doesn't matter that less waste and clean renewable energy are in everyones best interest, because cheap power is anathema to those who sell it for a living (cheap labor, OTOH.... ) That's why consumers will insist on poisoning, choking and roasting themselves BECAUSE IT COSTS THEM LESS. Once again, that's why businessmen whose only bottom line IS the bottom line accuse academics of greedy bias. It's like Lindsay Lohan ignoring her drug treatment counselor on the grounds that addicts can't be trusted.
) That's why consumers will insist on poisoning, choking and roasting themselves BECAUSE IT COSTS THEM LESS. Once again, that's why businessmen whose only bottom line IS the bottom line accuse academics of greedy bias. It's like Lindsay Lohan ignoring her drug treatment counselor on the grounds that addicts can't be trusted. That's the politics overriding the reason. You view 'the powers that be' as an enemy with selfish motives and ill-intent, I do not. I have noticed that that tends to be the driving force in most people's views on the matter. I consider a robust, industrialized economy as better equipped to handles this problem or any others which may pop up, and most of the solutions proposed by the greens that are not already things industry required little encouragement to adopt as threats to that. I think most greens view us as ripping down our house to keep the fire going so we don't freeze to death while ignoring the gaping whole we're putting in the walls and roof, from my perspective, adopting things which damage the economy is the same thing. Some people wish to meet this 'crisis' with a singular solution they feel addresses all the problems of society that they see, typically massive economic redistribution and a lot of times some return to an idolized past. Reasonable, sane measures are better, I tend to think our 'greedy leaders' are actually pretty good about doing this, whereas I tend to feel most of the enviro-types are bound and determined to take us down a road paved with little carbon friendly bricks scribed with the words 'good intentions'
Love of money is the root of all evil, and if I pinned my hopes on Earth or any place visible from it I'd be very depressed. As it is I'm just debating how ethical reproduction is in a world where each generation is going to be increasingly screwed AND under increasing pressure to reject salvation.
Yeah, see above.
"Where there is no vision, the people persih", I've heard. Most business leaders today seem woefully short sighted as well as selfish. Thus new CEOs can sell assets and fire workers to raise revenue and lower overhead, resulting in higher profits that allow them to deploy golden parachutes and cash out inflated stock before anyone realizes an unsustainable shell company is all that remains. We need not a singular but a comprehensive, multifaceted and sustainable solution. As long as problems are reduced to competing and conflicting interests little progress is possible without some authoritarian system (dubious progress), because "solutions" benefiting one group at the expense of the rest are (rightly) impossible in any democracy.
Personally, I think extremism is at least as dangerous in socioeconomics as in politics specifically, hence I favor socialism over both pure capitalism and pure communism (and I'd like to note in passing that socialism not only doesn't eliminate capitalism, it requires it). We don't need Luddite tree huggers, but also shouldn't pave the Earth and live in a manufactured ecosystem. Quite simply, we're not freaking smart or infallible enough to pull that off and anyone who tells you differently needs to reexamine all human history. Ideally I'd want to maintain a certain industrial baseline rather than trying to eliminate OR maximize it (ironically, a lot of the West is already moving this way) because a basic tenet of industrialization is that there comes a point of marginal returns.
We don't have to mass produce everything, and often it's not even advantageous. Ironically, that's more like the OTHER Civlization game, where I used to sell manufacturing plants in cities that didn't produce six shields, because the six gold it cost to maintain the plant made it a net loss. In a world with diminishing fossil fuels and electricity sources, making things by hand rather than machine, growing and buying food locally, etc. will increasingly be more cost effective than manufacturing everything you don't have shipped in from the other side of the world. Some things will still require manufacture; I can't handmake an artificial heart or refrigerator. However, an economy with 300 million artificial heart makers is an unsustainable America, and we're starting to see the practical truth of that. Past time we said farewell to the Scylla and Charybdis of Luddites and mechanophiles as well as of laissez-faire and communism.
I'm pretty sure this is the longest response I've ever made; if not, it's darned close, and since it's almost 5AM here I'm won't even try to edit it further. That's not a rebuke; 'twas a team effort, after all, and of a type I enjoy, but it took me five hours, which is also why I waited so long to respond: I KNEW it would take a while to do provide the response you deserved. Hopefully it didn't disappoint. The main thing is 1) we don't know if the doomsday scenarios are justified, 2) there's a middle road between total and nonexistent industrialization and 3) we need a comprehensive and sustainable long term solution that attacks this and all our socioeconomic problems on every front. Doesn't have to be some global government, and would be better if it weren't, but it does need to be highly integrated locally and globally.
Honorbound and honored to be Bonded to Mahtaliel Sedai
Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
Last First in wotmania Chat
Slightly better than chocolate.
Love still can't be coerced.
Please Don't Eat the Newbies!
LoL. Be well, RAFOlk.
So, I think I found a way to actually prove if Global Warming is happening.
- 19/11/2010 01:22:49 AM
603 Views
The idea that CO2 in the atmosphere holds in heat is not in dispute
- 19/11/2010 02:13:02 AM
467 Views
One need look no further than Venus.
- 19/11/2010 03:22:50 PM
422 Views
To find a ludicrous parallel?
- 19/11/2010 04:38:12 PM
369 Views
- 19/11/2010 04:38:12 PM
369 Views
Not THAT ludicrous, just more extreme.
- 19/11/2010 05:29:23 PM
403 Views
Re: Not THAT ludicrous, just more extreme. (edit)
- 19/11/2010 07:25:21 PM
353 Views
Re: Not THAT ludicrous, just more extreme. (edit)
- 22/11/2010 01:47:15 AM
1022 Views
There are limits as to how much some of this stuff can be simplified
- 22/11/2010 04:27:10 AM
559 Views
With apologies for the delay. 
- 03/12/2010 03:54:26 AM
532 Views
- 03/12/2010 03:54:26 AM
532 Views
I hate computers sometimes
- 03/12/2010 05:10:36 PM
458 Views
Yeah, remind me to start writing these responses in Word or something instead of on the CMB.
- 10/12/2010 04:53:30 PM
506 Views
- 10/12/2010 04:53:30 PM
506 Views
Or you could look at the established science which all but conclusively proves its existence.
- 19/11/2010 02:39:14 AM
386 Views