Climate Change

>> This fight over Global Warming is actually part of the War between Bigger Government and Entrepenures, and Private Enterprise and Free Markets.

I understand the temptation to reduce the science to "liberals want to spend my money and destroy industry". Especially since one part of the climate change "message" (reduce carbon emissions) sounds very much like an extreme far-left and anti-establishment position ("extreme consumerism may not be sustainable, especially if the Third World rises to, say 1/3 or even 1/4 our consumption of rersources")

But not every fact that conflicts with your dogma, or that supports someone else's dogma, is wrong! In fact, that kind of argument is like an argument ad hominem, which tries to convict the argument based on the character of the person asserting it.

Something like "argument ad ideology".

I try to go by what I hear from scientists in NOAA and NASA, or by what someone in one science (GMOs) believes about an allied science. For example, the link that back40bean found:
(http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei.html)

fact fact fact fact fact fact

Those seem more relevant to me than anecdotes about the Mongolian hordes.

Even the fact about about being able to get faster growth from a potato in a growth chamber is less relevant than the facts mentioned here about yield LOSS in the real world, where real crops are battered by the unprecedentedly erratic weather we are just starting to see.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/522596/why-we-will-need-genetically-modified-foods/

That's the MIT Technology Review article citing many independent scientific sources that all agree with the 90% of climatologists about global climate change. Like Reddit, they don't need to debate it since it's as obvious to them as to 90% of climatologists. They just need to factor observed, measured changes into their specialties, crop yields.

it might interest some here in different ways, since it expresses a strongly pro-GMO opinion, and assumes that climate change is already here and likely to get worse. Since those two attitudes cut across political lines, many people are likely to accept one half and reject the other half along pure party lines.

They were trying to evaluate how much we will NEED to rely on genengineering to keep crop yields rising fast enough to keep pace with population growth. They all agree that erratic weather caused by global climate change has already depressed crop yields relative to expected and historical yield increases, and make some USEFUL observations about the impact of a few very-unusually hot days compared to the whole-season-average of 1-2 degrees.

Anyway, I hope I'm very wrong about the eventual severity and how soon it will be so bad as to be obvious even to those politically pre-disposed to ignore and deny a scientific consensus.

When conservatives hear anti-GMO liberals say that any pro-GMO experiment was conducted by lackeys of the Industrial-Monsanto complex (exaggerating for effect), the conservatives are quick to say "you're huffing your own dogma - of course we should believe the scientists, they all tell the truth".

But as soon as 90% of climatologists agree on something that would put limits on industrial expansion, conservatives are quick to say that merely BEING a climatologist makes them liars out to score a research grant.

Unfortunately, here, I agree with Ernie again: probably the facts of massively rising CO2 levels and the current theories and models of that young science DO conflict with unfettered industrial expansion and resource-wasteful lavish consumerism. Coal miners are only the first ones who will suffer when energy prices go up - in effect charging to the current generation the costs of averting famine in the next 2-3 generations.

I thought that was how it worked: parents sacrifice to make the world safe for their children. I had also hoped that we would have made some international progress while the world economy was in fairly good shape. Now is not a good time to add to anyone's financial burden. But if we add global crop failures to the mix, it will get harder, not easier, to male painful choices.

It seems to me that, the longer we wait to "prove" that the Keeling Curve is as much of a global disaster as it seems to be, the harder it will become to reduce global crop failures, famines and the likelihood of stumbling into mankind's usual answer to famine: war.

But Ernie's argument is winning at this time: drill drill drill and consume consume consume until we PROVE to EVERYONE that climatologists are right and the only question is "how bad, how soon?"


I also used to hope that (slight, gradual, uniformly) increasing temperatures, or rather the increasing AVERAGE rainfall that climate models used to predict would turn more deserts into grain fields than it turned tropic farms into deserts or swamps. I just didn't want to think what India would be like if it averaged 2-5 degrees hotter!

If all of Siberia thawed and the entire Sahel region had more rainfall, I thought, maybe that would "make up for" the Midwest becoming a desert dust bowl and Florida and Texas becoming tropical or worse, instead of sub-tropical as they are now.

But the agronomists in that Tech review article showed that such optimism is NOT indicated. MAYBE the climate will settle down into some stable pattern AFTER we level off the Keeling Curve, but that might take ??? centuries after the deniers let us start working on it really hard.

In the meantime, all we will have is change and unexpected extremes.

Finding varieties that thrive under changed-but-predictable conditions will be hard enough. Dealing with changed pests and plant diseases due to changed (but stable) local climates will be hard enough.

Changing a region's agriculture from cotton, or tobacco, or corn and soybeans to cassava and breadfruit and bananas or whatever will be hard enough.

But you can't "adapt" to hottest-and-driest-ever one year, and coldest-and-wettest-ever the next year.

Quoting:

"Climate change is likely to make the problem far worse, bringing higher temperatures and, in many regions, wetter conditions that spread infestations of disease and insects into new areas. Drought, damaging storms, and very hot days are already taking a toll on crop yields, and the frequency of these events is expected to increase sharply as the climate warms. For farmers, the effects of climate change can be simply put: the weather has become far more unpredictable, and extreme weather has become far more common."

...

"Such variation is “worrisome and very bad for agriculture,” he says. “It’s extremely challenging to breed for it. If you have a relatively stable climate, you can breed crops with genetic characteristics that follow a certain profile of temperatures and rainfall. As soon as you get into a state of flux, it’s much more difficult to know what traits to target.”"

"David Lobell, a professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford University, ...
and his collaborators have clarified the projections by combing through historical records of weather and agricultural production. They found that from 1980 to 2008, climate change depressed yields of wheat and corn; yields still rose during that time, but overall production was 2 to 3 percent less than it would have been if not for global warming. This has held true across most of the regions where corn and wheat are grown."

"Lobell and his collaborator Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University, have found evidence that in the case of several important crops, the negative effect of global warming is more strongly tied to the number of extremely hot days than to the rise in average temperatures over a season. If that’s true, earlier research might have severely underestimated the impact of climate change by looking only at average temperatures."

when I suggested we "follow the money" I was thinking about the people who have the most to lose if we try to slow down or reverse the Keiling curve, with government policies. That would have to be the folks who find and produce fossil fuels. That is quite a lot bigger pot of money than what Al Gore will ever make on his movie or all research grants ever awarded probably. If you were in Exxon or Shell's shoes right now, would you jump on board with all the people whose opinion could put you out of business? I doubt it and I also think they would not hesitate to lobby hard, and with all that money, they can lobby big and hard. They have the money to buy scientists opinions, they have the money to buy congress people. They have the money to buy the best advertising and persuasive tactics out there. I cannot imagine the likes of them just saying, OK. Let's just leave all this carbon in the ground and re-tool to use solar or wind or other energy. It would change the world as they have known it since oil was discovered.

Good point, SM3. With enough money, one can buy practically anything on the face of the earth. Politics has always been about money and power and I doubt that will ever change. Sometimes we mistake "back-bone" and "morality" in politics, but I think the underlying, true support for an issue is always the previous motivation. I know I have a jaded perception, but having followed politics for 70 years, that is simply my rational for what I see.

Ken

Nobody is spending more on alternatives to oil and gas than Exxon and Shell. These companies are in the energy business...not the oil and gas business. They plan to be around for a long time.

The companies that are developing organic products are the big pesticide companies...

Rick,
We don't know if any of the variations that were seen in weather from 1980 to 2008 were due to global climate change or just the normal variations in weather. It is very hard to attribute variations in weather to loss of yield. There could have been other factors that caused those drops in yields(they were imaginary drops in yield...actually yields went up) other than weather. The paper promotes a theory but does not provide any scientific testing. And as an agronomist myself with a fairly good understanding of growing conditions world wide... we have had much less variations in growing conditions and yields in the last 35 years than say the previous 35 or 50 years. We havent had multi year droughts with dust bowl like conditions over multiple seasons or summer time freezes or total crop failures. We have seen yields continue to increase, while growers have done that with less fertilizer, less pesticides, less land, and less water.

Rrr I try to go by what I hear from scientists in NOAA and NASA, or by what someone in one science (GMOs) believes about an allied science. For example, the link that back40bean found:

Ee Rick, One of the weaker parts of your arguments for Global Warming is because you rely so much on Government Climatologists. If you look at them as a Government Climatology Choir, then of course they must sing whatever the Choir Director tells them too. If you had an equal mix of Climatologists that work in Private enterprise, the results of a poll would be more credible.

And Rick, putting your ideology and bias aside for a minute, do you really believe that papers published by members of the Choir are really more relevant than the changes the Mongolian Hordes made in their World as it was, from Siberia to the tip of India and from Kamchatka to Rome? It just happens the warming period then has been proved.

Rrrrr I thought that was how it worked: parents sacrifice to make the world safe for their children. I had also hoped that we would have made some international progress while the world economy was in fairly good shape. Now is not a good time to add to anyone's financial burden
Eee I certainly agree that sacrificing for the sake of others is commendable. But I did not see any of the Eco Nuts sharing the sacrifice when they destroyed the families in the Logging Industry because they were mistakenly convinced that the loggers were harming the Spotted Owls. And I do not think the Warmies are going to share the sacrifice of the Coal Miners Families if they are successful in their goals to shut down coal mining. And I think there is a very good possibility that the WARMIES are just as wrong as the Eco Nuts were.

I guess it is easier to worry about the poor people in Bangladesh in the distant future than to worry about some neighbors in West Virginia in the next 20 years, but I just do not agree with that.

Rrr But you can't "adapt" to hottest-and-driest-ever one year, and coldest-and-wettest-ever the next year.

eee Yes you can adapt. California has been adapting to El Nino and La Nina conditions, not yearly, but every few years, and they have been recorded ever since the Spanish Galleons were sailing the Pacific 600 years ago. We go through a very wet flooding cycle when El Nino warms the Pacific, and the dry cycle of La Nina, as of now, when it cools.

Quoting:

rrr "Climate change is likely to make the problem far worse, bringing higher temperatures and, in many regions, wetter conditions that spread infestations of disease and insects into new areas. Drought, damaging storms, and very hot days are already taking a toll on crop yields, and the frequency of these events is expected to increase sharply as the climate warms. For farmers, the effects of climate change can be simply put: the weather has become far more unpredictable, and extreme weather has become far more common

Eee Rick, One of the things that rob these dire predictions of a lot of credibility is the qualifiers they always contain, like the fourth word in your paragraph above, “LIKELY,”. What kind of racehorse is that to bet your farm on?. ALMOST anything is LIKELY to happen SOONER OR LATER. Using enough qualifiers like that just destroys the credibility of a prediction..


rrrr "Lobell and his collaborator Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University, have found evidence that in the case of several important crops, the negative effect of global warming is more strongly tied to the number of extremely hot days than to the rise in average temperatures over a season. If that’s true, earlier research might have severely underestimated the impact of climate change by looking only at average temperatures."

eee I laughed, but I agreed with the above. I laughed because Lobell and Schllnker spent years in College and searching for proof of what any farmer could tell them whether he was even literate of not. Absolutely, more damage is done to crops on Extremely Hot days, and the more of them, the more damage they do. And I am sure it is going to get warmer sometimes so the only difference between me and a Warmie, is that I think it is going to get cooler, too. Or as we used to say, the Climate is going to Change.
Ernie

>> we have had much less variations in growing conditions and yields in the last 35 years than say the previous 35 or 50 years.

That would probably be an extremely relevant point if true. I'm going by what I see a large preponderance of in reports that seem mainly "nerdy" and not political or hyper-ventilating, that the last 3-10 years have had more variations and extremes than random chance would have predicted.

My impression was that it was indeed not possible to distinguish the signal form the "noise" until recently. But that now it was. I'm going by what I read, and I haven't dived into papers on climatology, in part because I don;t know the lingo and in part because I'm pretty sure they are mostly reliant on statistics and modeling, where i would be totally unable to judge their rigor.

(It is a good argument for "your side" that ANY predictions based only on statistics and models or a very young science are very weak compared to "proof" as physicists and chemists can get "proof". My counter to that is only "how SURE do you need to be that the fire alarm is reporting a real fire, to get out of bed and do something about it?" What if you lived in a flammable boat when the fire alarm went off, and every person on Earth lived in the same boat?)

But the glacial retreats, sea level increase, surface sea temperature increases and so on ARE indisputable, since they are measurements and DO exceed historical maximums.

(Unless you go back as far as Ice Ages ending, and if the argument is that "global climate change probably won't be much more disruptive than an Ice Age / interglacial transition", I'll take my position as being very strongly agreed with.)

>> The paper promotes a theory but does not provide any scientific testing.

Yes and no. How could you measure what the yield WOULD have been if there had not been adverse weather?

Their claim that average yield on one crop WOULD HAVE gone up (say) 3% as it had been doing for the last 5-10 years BUT ON LY went up 1% due to weather ... is just their claim based on some calculations that were not reproduced in Tech Review.

So it is only an assertion based on some calculation. I suppose that you could have a yield/temperature curve, plug in the temperatures observed, and calculate a speculative yield suppression.

By the way, I couldn't gauge one claim in that article. They said that corn gets really unhappy and yield drops when the temperature goes over 30C (which is only 86 F) for even a few days. I thought that corn flourished in HOT weather, which in my mind exceeds 90F.

Maybe they meant when the all-day-average-temp exceeded 86F, which could be 96 at noon and 76 at night. Does corn have trouble in weather like that? That sounded fishy to me.

Steady, Ken,
I agree there are probably some Millionaires and Billionaires that own stock in the Major Oil Companies and Coal Mines, but just forget any envy or resentment you may have towards rich people, and think about who is going to be hurt the most by the Carbon Regulations.

Is it a billionaire that does not worry about the cost of gas that goes in his car so he can go to work, or is it the poor working stiff, one of those fellows that have to buy five dollar gas 2 gallons at a time. The poor working stiff will only be able to buy one gallon when the price goes up to 10 dollars a gallon. So, who is the biggest loser.

Or, is Al Gore going to worry about paying a few more thousand a month for his huge electric bill, or is it going to be a poor woman living on her SS check that sees her bill go up ten times, per the guy from the EPA, that said the wholesale price of electricity was going to go up 8 or 10 times if all the proposed EPA regulations go into effect. So, if her bill now is 15 dollars, her cost will go up several times that amount. So, THINK about it, is it the rich man that is going to suffer, or is it the little guy.

And I agree with Drobarr, the business of business is making money, so when the coal mines close, those people will invest that money somewhere else, probably in other types of energy, and keep on making money. So, think about it, Who is the ultimate loser from all of these regulations

Ernie

Rick,

I have just one comment on the melting Arctic ice, and it is true but not widely publicized. Two years ago, a record number of sail boats as well as other boats, made it through the NorthWest passage, above Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

A few had made it over the years, usually taking more than one season, but most were blocke by too much ice. So, those boats going through proved the Ice was melting.

As Sailors are an adventurous bunch, a lot of them tried to go through last year, and most of them got frozen in, so there is now a record number of boats locked in the ice up there, and may not thaw out this summer.

Ernie

I don't see any relevance of Mongolian invasions to weather variations. Are you still arguing that "weather has changed in the past"? That extra warmth drove them out of their homelands due to drought? I would rather use "Mongolian Invasions" as proof that relatively minor changes in climate can drive population migrations and wars - few of their neighbors considered the Mongol horde welcome guests.

Ernie, if you think every research scientist in the world is deluded or part of a world-wide conspiracy because he doesn't work for private industry, please let's just agree to disagree.

Theorizing that everyone who disagrees you is part of a conspiracy of deceit is an UN-disprovable theory at best. I'm not interested in that line of argument. For one thing, most governments would rather SUPPRESS news about terrifying changes that might shake their hold on power.

>> And Rick, putting your ideology and bias aside for a minute, do you really believe that papers published by members of the Choir

Translate "the choir" into "almost every scientific researcher in the field" ... yes.

They don't all think or say that the changes will be as dire or as quick as I fear is possible. But ask any of them to set an upper limit on how bad it MIGHT be say at the 10% level of confidence) in 100 or 200 years if CO2 levels keep going up this fast, and I doubt you could get 10% of them to put their reputation on the line and say it WON'T be disastrous.

Next paragraph: I understand that you are furious at and completely distrust, maybe even hate, groups that you give names like "Warmies" and econuts. I would never have called a spade a spade with the name "Deniers" until you villifed the entire scientific community by calling them "Warmies". And someone else made a point about using using mino5r quibbles to put down as "junk science" anything that someone wanted to disagree with. Something like "it is easier to quibble that there is a weakness in someone's "proof" than to prove they are wrong."

I would put the shoe on the other foot. Instead of demanding PROOF that a stick of dynamite with a burning fuse really, certainly, provably will be bad thing in some amount of time, I would say that we desperately NEED to start looking now for ways to put that fuse out until some PROVES that dynamite doesn't explode.

I know that you can look at the Keeling Curve and still say "so what". I don;t understand it, but that is at the root of our disagreement, other than politics.

Whether or not stopping the clear-cutting that I still see many scars from in WA helped any endangered species or not, you seem to be advancing an argument like "nothing that interferes with industry or loses a job can be tolerated even if we have to deny something as obvious as the Keeling Curve, melting glaciers AND oceans warming up".

That's why I compare it to gasoline or a stick of dynamite. It's not abstract any more, it is blatant and observable. Thinking that it won;t continue getting worse at an accelerating rate makes as much sense as "we don;t need to do anything, you have not PROVED that the fuse won;t just go out on its own".

I still don't see how ANYONE can look at the Keeling Curve and not predict doomsday. Now or in 100 or 200 years, a VERY DIFFERENT PLANET.

Granted, many people see it your way and not my way. I HOPE they are right, because the downside of the bet is huge.

Eee Rick, One of the things that rob these dire predictions of a lot of credibility is the qualifiers

The only alternative would be to do nothing until it is completely PROVABLE to people as far into denial as you are, that the house IS on fire and the boat IS sinking.

Unfortunately, due to planetary inertia, that translates into many billions more of CO2 released than the current terrifying level. It might not be "fixable" now. Waiting 10, 20, or 30 years might PROVE that we can't fix it and PROVE that human population will drop from 87 billion down to who-knows-what after we're done fighting over the consequences.

In other words, by the time it can be PROVED, it will be much too late because the fire will have spread too far to be put out and the boat will have flooded below-decks.

I suppose I weaken my case by talking about major disasters that "might be" 20 or 50 years away, when I should just admit that it WILL occur within some small number of centuries. But every year, the problem gets harder to fix.

>> What kind of racehorse is that to bet your farm on?.

You don't bet the planet on "it might NOT happen very soon".

>> Absolutely, more damage is done to crops on Extremely Hot days, and the more of them, the more damage they do.

I'm sorry to hear that, it was the weakest thing I saw in that article. I thought corn grew well where weather was "hot", and I thought that meant up to 100 F.

Prove to me that the fossil fuel companies are working harder than anyone on alternative energies.

Steady, I guess you are directing your question to Rick, but you can probably find it by googleing Shell or BP and with Alternative Energy as part of the caption.

But what i like about bit corporations doing it, they use their own money and do not borrow tax payers money and then spend it foolishly and go bankrupt.

Ernie

Steady
I googled it and found hundreds of articles. BP was reported to have invested 7 Billion since 2007, Chevron reported to have invested 5.4 Billion and Rolling Stones says they ar lying, so it sounds like another GMO discussion.

Ernie

>> So, those boats going through proved the Ice was melting.

Also satellite photography.

>> so there is now a record number of boats locked in the ice up there, and may not thaw out this summer.

That IS funny.

I just hope and pray that the "thermo-haline circulation" is not already weakening. That's the "conveyor belt" that carried heat from the tropics North until it cooled, froze out some fresher water, and then the cold, dense, saltier water sank into the abyssal depths and (over a few hundred years" circled back to the tropics where it warmed and rose.

Some models predict that, but I thought it came relatively late in those models. Once it does happen, the far North gets colder again, but so do northern Europe and northern North America.

So far so good, because that would counter average warming for the medium-high latitude North.

The downside is that less heat would be carried away form the tropics by ocean water, and the tropics and southern seas would warm faster (it would increase the north-south temperature gradient).

I don't think India and the rest of the tropics will be happy to know that while the global average is "somewhat hotter", they get that PLUS more heat from decreased "thermo-haline circulation".

When they need to change their crop varieties to adapt to hotter-than-tropical climates, they'll find there are none. True, in a few hundred thousand years, "something will adapt", but one possibility is that they won't be able to grow ANY food ... or ay their crop yields drop by 80-90%. So will their populations. That the kind of reason the DoD has put together some scenarios, or used that argument to try for adequate budgets.

Oh, yes. You can use models to pick any numbers you want, but whereas the models talk about "a few degrees" of average global warming, losing the "thermo-haline circulation" could drop winter temperatures in Northern Europe, Canada and the northern USA by a very unknown amount. wait and see - it MIGHT not be 20-30 degrees, it MIGHT be only 5 or 10 degrees. What effect would that have on growing season length?

I think that loss of "thermo-haline circulation" is one of the "runaway scenarios" where change is slow up until some point, then more rapid, because of positive feedback. I could very easily be wrong, and so could the models.

Then it gets even more speculative, but warmer ocean surface and hotter tropics suggest more and more violent cyclonic storms.

Anyway, we ARE betting the farm that NONE of that, and nothing remotely LIKE that will happen, when (it's true), we don't KNOW.

The models aren't solid yet, in part because models are only reliable when you already have experience with what you're modeling and know all the relevant factors.

We DON'T know whether losing "thermo-haline circulation" to the point of depopulating the tropics is a worst-case or just a middle-case of-the-road case. Is that an argument for doing nothing, or for panicking?

Only having the one planet an wanting it to remain habitable, I think the rational thing to do is to panic 20-30 years ago, and be 10-20 years into mitigating the problem with measured actions.

Or we could wait for another 50 billion tons to be added to the problem. Maybe it will just go away! Maybe we WON'T make the Earth nearly uninhabitable.

Not treating it as an immediate danger (and trying to find solutions like nuclear power that won't be as disruptive as shutting down all the factories) seems crazy to me.

I understand that I'm a minority on this thread.

(whimsically)

Like the GMO researcher who some magazine (the New Yorker?) claimed thought that Monsanto was bugging him and had hit men lurking in alleys (I think I'm exaggerating somewhat) , here's my factitious scenario for BP's investment in alternative energy.

They are funding "research into alternative energy" so they can find everyone who wants to do that research. Then they will bribe them or brainwash them into being like Ernie's Choir, following dead-end ideas and publishing millions of papers "proving" that solar panel don't work and windmills kill eagles. Geothermal causes pollution. There's no radon in coal. Tides are imaginary.

Or just invite them all to one big "alternative energy conference", all expenses paid, collapse the roof on them with explosives, and blame the solar panels.


Like Red China's "One Thousand Flowers" campaign.

Or Count Vlad Drakul, inviting all his enemies to big feast and then burning the hall down.

Kidding.

Major oil companies typically earn 4 billion per month so what part of their budget would 7 billion be over 7 years? It's not much comparitively speaking. They kinda missed the boat on the fracking for gas in the US so they are looking at other parts of the world to find shale to drill. I think they were just too big to respond quickly on the shale oil in time to capitalize on US shale. The smaller independents were better positioned. The majors sat on and are still sitting on a lot of cash. They invested heavily in deep water rigs where smaller independents dont have the capital to go for.

It always makes me silly , discussing about all this , I was around for the going under of Texas oil in 1970 , East Houston was a Ghost Town for over a year ,
This I have seen , When those Energy industries go under , Whole Cities go with them , Just like the Boom and Bust Days ,
Until they come up with a super Transducer for Gravitational energy use or One for Solar Panels (The coming idea being you can drive forever With a Solar panel the size of your Desktop with a Super Transducer )
Then When that happens (with the price of copper ) a Wireless Electric Motor will be needed , it's coming and these actually exist ,
It will be the same until everyone changes as to "the same old same old ) Only that is not going to happen anytime soon ...
(Bad to Worse , then Worst to Better ) Always the way it has been ,,
We will argue on , and so will all ... Here's to still believing in tomorrow ...
Like you all are saying though , if not for these big companies ? We would all be the going under , Not everyone has say 5 to 30 Billion in their wallet everytime they have a good idea .

I posted the earlier links to NOAA and NASA just hoping to find a common point of agreement from which to continue a discussion. I am not a scientist and I don't have any answers, but it does seem that changes have occurred that warrant a closer look. The Keeling Curve looks scary to me and I haven't read anything to make me think everything's going to just be alright, but I'm still listening. I understand that we have not found a point of agreement, but here are a couple more links.

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/science/scientists-sound-alarm-on-climate.html?ref=science&_r=0

Steady,
I researched the Major Oil company profits and only Exxon made 4 Billion a month. The other majors earned from 1 to 2.5 B, but those figures standing alone do not mean anything. They have to be paired with the total investment it takes to make that money. Oil Companies typically make less than 5%, on their invested Capital, while Apple makes many times that percentage, so if you want to be mad at someone for making too much money, you should be mad at Apple. I would not buy any major oil company stock because they do not make enough profit for that to be a good investment, but stock is available for anyone that wants to buy it.

Shell was the pioneer in developing the Shale oil and gas, as they made big investments on the Front Range of the Rockies 30 years or so ago. But the price of crude was under forty dollars a barrel, and the Shale oil required a minimum of 60 dollars to make it feasible. So, Shell gave up and walked away from it, much to the chagrin of some of my relatives that lived in Wyoming. Once the price of Crude got high enough to make it feasible, everyone jumped in.

You are correct that a lot of cash is being "sat on", not only by the major oil companies, but that is because no one has confidence in the future economy, and have not been able to calculate what all the new regulations are going to cost. But no one likes to have money sitting idle, and when the government allows the Economy to recover, that money will be invested.

The reason we need to be thankful for the big corporations is just what you said. They are the only ones that have the Capital to Risk, in doing the deep water drilling. And i am sure you see the benefit for all of us, being able to access those deep water reserves.

Ernie

Rick,

Corn is a C4 plant thus it is very efficient at warmer temperatures compared to a C3 plant like wheat. But there is not a magical temperature where the plant shuts down. This can depend on the age and stage of the crop as well as the moisture availability at the time of the heat stress. Also the duration of the heat stress and the previous weather. Humidity can also play a role as well as wind. Corn can struggle at any temperature if it lacks moisture. So soil type and moisture holding capacity which can vary in a given field often affects how well corn is able to handle hot weather.

Corn is senstive to temperature most during pollination. It it is hot and dry and has poor soil moisture, pollination will be poor. Pollen cant survive extremely hot temperatures...and has a shorter life under hot dry conditions. Likewise it it rains during pollination this can also detrimentally affect pollination. Each one of the silks is connected to a kernal and for each kernal to fill a pollen spore must enter the end of the silk and travel its way down to the ear.

High night time temperatures can be a factor as well when a plant shifts from photosynthesis to respiration, temperatures can negatively impact respiration.

Its not unusual for almost all plants to literally shut down during the hottest part of the day. Stomates begin to close when the evapotranspiration which cools the plants much like sweat cools us evaporates faster than what the roots can replace it and wilting a occurs. Plants will close their stomates and stop photosynthesis until turgidity can be restored.

New GMO varieties of corn have increased tolerance to drought and heat and there is naturally great variations in varieties.

If a drought even happens early on, corn over the season can recuperate so to speak. The later the drought event, the more likely it can affect yield, unless pollination has already occured and the crop is reaching maturity.

Again...the oil companies together have invested more money in R&D for alternative fuels than any government has. When you include utility companies like PPL and others it is staggering how much has been invested compared to what the government has invested.

Oil companies have invested more in these alternatives as a percentage of profits than the percentage our government spends on them and what it takes in!

And Ernie is correct to say that much of what the government has invested has been wasted into technologies that never came to fruition and were more likley payoffs to donors and friends of those who are in power.

We could have a discussion on whether its governments role to invest the peoples money in these types of research, particularly when we have to borrow the money to do so.

Back40Bean, those links are excellent but I suspect you're wasting your time here. I haven't seen anyone respond to the very dramatic rise in the Keeling Curve that you and Rick have mentioned, and doubt that it will be acknowledged here.

Rick said: "But the glacial retreats, sea level increase, surface sea temperature increases and so on ARE indisputable, since they are measurements and DO exceed historical maximums."

Rick...you are correct...glacial retreats, sea level increase, surface sea temperature increases and so on ARE indisputable and are of concern. But your next statement of "exceed historical maximums" is incorrect. Oceans have been several feet higher than where they currently are. Temperatures have also significantly been higher....they find all sorts of tropical foliage in places that are hardly tropical and this isn't due to shifting land masses. I am not sure they are able to determine historical sea temperatures or not.

An though the media makes a big deal every time a new record temperature either hot or cold or some other extreme event occurs these have always been happening somewhere all the time. The hottest temperature ever recorded was in 1913 in death valley...at 136 degrees. Now thats extreme!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_graph

GHG, We can talk about the keeling curve here any time. Nobody is disputing it that I know of.

Nobody is denying that CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing and that human activity is involved. Where there is disagreement is whether glacial retreats, sea level increase, surface sea temperature increases and any observed variations in weather are the result of this rise in CO2 or not.

Changes in glaciers, sea level, and sea temperatures have always occurred and those changes occurred without any changes in CO2 concentration. So if those changes happened before, how do we know that the changes we are seeing are due to the CO2 concentrations and not some other reason...the same reasons why they changed previously.

My opinion as a scientist is that there are also many factors involved that regulates earths temperatures.

I see climate scientists fixation on CO2 as a mistake because other possibilities arent even being considered.

And even if CO2 were proven to cause the warming...what is causing the cooling...and why arent we seeing a steady increase in warming that paralells linearly with the keeling curve. If the earth is warming due to such high CO2 concentrations we should not be having record cold temperatures. Temperatures that are colder than they have been for over 100 years.

Is anyone monitering the temperatures of Mars compared to the past?

GG, I have never denied that Carbon is increasing. That has been measured, so that is a fact, but the speculation and forecasts that have not come true in the past is what i cannot accept as being infallible.

But i remember when Freon was the focus and Warmies were positive if they outlawed Freon, then the Greenhouse effect would be taken care of. So millions of dollars of needless expense was dumped on the public, refrigerant gas went from 1 dollar a pound to 15 or 20 dollars a pound, and now they have found a new bugaboo. So i am waiting for actual proof, not more panic driven hype, before i believe anything the Warmies say.

Ernie

One of the articles I linked to mentions the banning of the use of chlorofluorocarbons because of their link to the depletion of ozone in the stratosphere. I don't ever remember hearing that they were the sole cause of the greenhouse effect and that their banning would solve the problem but it would not surprise me to find out I am wrong. Was that really the case?

I would not swear that was the only thing but it was the main thing, and the only one i recall.

I do not recall hearing about Carbon until much later. Keeling has been measuring carbon for a long time, but it did not get much attention because less than 20 or 30 years ago, the big worry was a coming Ice age that was going to destroy the agriculture in Europe. I was a lot busier back in those days and did not have time or email to be so welll informed.

In fact, i think this information explosion is partly the cause of the current panic. 50 years ago if we had bad weather it did not make national news, so no one far away heard of it, and we did not constanlty hear about bad weather in other places. Now we are constantly bombarded by reports of floods, blizzards, Droughts, etc, and seldom hear about Good Weather anywhere.

Ernie

I certainly agree that the information explosion is the cause, at least the fuel for a lot of panic. My wife and I have a small cabin in western NC where we have neither TV reception nor an internet connection and I never return from there feeling that I've missed out on anything.

Banning the use of freon and related chemicals worked. The hole in the ozone layer that protects us, has healed.

I don't think warming was ever blamed on the ozone hole. Destruction of ozone by chlorine (in CFCs) was all related to reduction of protection from UV radiation. Eliminating CFCs did stop the destruction of the ozone layer.

I certainly agree with the information overload idea. Way too much info and we can have it slanted to our own biases to boot. It ain't good.

back40bean,

>> "Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities,"

Again you lead the pack in finding information (not rhetoric). Thanks very much ... but even I didn't think the literal warming was THAT far advanced, or the agreement that nearly universal.

Your link led to this one, "harder to grow crops" , that connects "climate change" back to the global need for better genengineering techniques:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/science/earth/05harvest.html?pagewanted=all


(Usually when I see "Temperature Anomaly" they mean air temps, averaged over a year, and this might have one-year data points. I think it varies too much to be ocean-surface temps. Darn. Climate change IS as far along as I feared.)


>> This can depend on the age and stage of the crop as well as the moisture availability at the time of the heat stress.
>> naturally great variations in varieties.

Understood. Good points. Dry corn at a vulnerable stage might up and die at (say) 86F where well watered corn at some other stage might take 100 for a day and (for example) only slow down and then recover.

Side issue: someone who was looking for the "CO2 bump" under filed conditions in wheat, rice and corn saw none in corn, and only half what they expected in wheat & rice, based on growth chamber and greenhouse tests. One field trial means very little, but it's a hint that "more CO2" doesn't necessarily stimulate crops in a field as well as it does in a controlled environment.

>> Its not unusual for almost all plants to literally shut down during the hottest part of the day.

Ouch. So there is probably SOME downside from even moderate, average changes for the hotter (in hot climates).

>> And Ernie is correct to say that much of what the government has invested has been wasted into technologies that never came to fruition

>> We could have a discussion on whether its governments role to invest the peoples money in these types of research, particularly when we have to borrow the money to do so.

Again, that is pretty pure politics and ideology, but I toss in my 1.5 cents (inflation):

Privately or publicly owned companies are least likely to invest in expensive cutting edge research like commercializing higher-efficiency solar panels. The risk is high, and even if they DO find the Holy Grail that 'saves the world", they might not even recover their high-risk investment before the patents expire and trade secrets leak out.

If it is NOT funded by any government, we will never discover it. If we 'really need it", we'll just have to do without, if every government in the world were gung-ho laissez-faire, living back in the 1800s.

Fortunately, Red China (I never thought I would string THOSE three words in a sequence), IS far-sighted enough to invest in solar panel research and (as of a few years ago, at least), pretty much cornered the high-efficiency low-cost point in the market at that time. Embarrassing for capitalism, and our balance of payments, and our domestic job market.

>> Oceans have been several feet higher than where they currently are.

There was no agricultural during the previous interglacial period. Also, no coastal cities technological civilization to collapse. If there were ANY primates in the genus Homo way back then, they were already scattered hunter-gatherers lucky to have a cave to live in. If that is supposed to be reassuring - the coming human-caused climate change won't be any worse for humanity than a transition inot or out of an Ice Age ... I'm not reassured.

>> An though the media makes a big deal every time a new record temperature

Back40bean's first link made it clear that the whole last DECADE, averaged globally, was the hottest decade on record. Eyeballing the graph, it is a steady rise with one temporary flattening. NOT rnqdom variation.

I usually don't like the "appeal to authority", but I was surprised to hear that 90% of ANY science could agree on ANYTHING beyond "F=ma". Now I hear from reputable sources that 97% agree that the change is coming, some is already clearly measurable, and humans are a significant factor. Case closed.

We still don't know HOW bad or how soon. But (in my opinion), it is prudent to start bailing out the boat BEFORE the water breaks over the mast.

>> I see climate scientists fixation on CO2 as a mistake because other possibilities aren't even being considered.

All the other factors they can THINK OF are being added to models (and debated) as people think of them.

Like reflectance from clouds, different kinds of clouds predominating, oceans absorbing both heat and CO2, acidification absorbing more or releasing more CO2, reflectance from ice, snow and deserts, methane, CFcs, ozone, high-altitude particulates and aerosols, geo-bio-climate interactions like plankton taking up more CO2 when there are dust storms ...

That's why the predictions keep changing. It's not "the Choir changing its story", it’s a new science discovering more and more factors in a VERY complex system, and extrapolating into regions where the planet has never been before.

>> And even if CO2 were proven to cause the warming...what is causing the cooling...and why arent we seeing a steady increase in warming that paralells linearly with the keeling curve.

All the other factors, plus natural variability.

It may be a cop-out to say "it's so complex that it's very non-linear, or even chaotic" and "it is a young science and [u]still looking for all the relevant factors[/u]". But it's also true.

I stumbled on an unrelated article in Tech Review that pointed out that only scientists have the luxury of suspending judgment until they have "proof". Policy makers, governmental and business, have to make timely decisions BEFORE they have 100% certainty, or even 80% certainty. The market might move on them, or a problem become intractable, if they waited to be CERTAIN before making the best decision possible, at that time.

They need to avert things like a company going bankrupt, or mass famines, early enough to prevent the downside.

>> Is anyone monitoring the temperatures of Mars compared to the past?

I don't know, but I bet we don't have anything more than a few ballpark estimates earlier than (guessing) 1970. And maybe not much before 1990. I just don't know. To do a good job, wouldn't they need an orbiter?

Hmm, Google Mars Climate Orbiter ... they launshed it in 1998, but it went dead in 1999 due to a software defect. One section of ground-based code used Metric units (SI), and another section used English! Bad testing! (I write software for aircraft braking systems, and these things are always embarassing).

"ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-seconds (lbf×s) instead of the metric units of newton-seconds (N×s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed. "

But there IS some speculation about what changed Mars from a world with some running water (at least in spots) to a near-vacuumn dry, cold desert.

Maybe an ancient Martian civilization denied climate change a few decades too long, and then they lost everything including most of their atmosphere in some runaway event.

Be warned, maybe.

>> But i remember when Freon was the focus and Warmies were positive if they outlawed Freon, then the Greenhouse effect would be taken care of.

I thought the environmentalists' concern about CFCs was mainly their effect on ozone. I don't remember any environmentalists ranting about CFC-global-warming, only penguin-sunburn and humans eventually going blind from the noonday sun. (Yes I'm exaggerating, and indeed my memory is fallible.) However, ask anyone in Australia about UV on their beaches. Already there was noticeable human health impact (skin melanoma).

CFCs ARE also greenhouse gases, very potent, though at least they are lower in concentration than CO2 THANKS TO global regulation.

CFCs are one of the "other factors" that the climate modelers are trying to include accurately.

I don't know how mainstream the "CFC-Ozone-cosmic-ray-sunspot-UV factor is to climate change, but I think someone cited it on this thread. It sounded to me like some researcher with a big name in an Ozone-UV specialty including the interaction with CFCs, but what do I know?

>> So millions of dollars of needless expense was dumped on the public,
>> So i am waiting for actual proof

Banning some CFCs is already curing the ozone hole. That is also measurable and is not argued by any reputable scientist. The scientists were delighted that that "fix" effect was visible so rapidly.

>> So i am waiting for actual proof, not more panic driven hype, before i believe anything the Warmies say.

CFC concentration, ozone density measurements, ground level UV at high latitudes, the numbers ARE in already. Since we didn't wait for mass blindness and Deniers admitting facts before starting the fix.

>> before i believe anything the Warmies say.

Sometimes it seems like the Sahara will freeze over AND both ice caps melt before you'll believe anything "the Warmies" say.

Just once, so you can hear what it sounds like to others, would you please try saying "blah blah blah before I'll believe anything that 97% of the entire scientific community says."

And keep the same tone of disgust and contempt in your voice when you say "the entire scientific community".

You respected their mainstream opinion when they declared GMOs safe, and you didn't even need 97% consensus.

Hmmm. My prediction is not working out so well.

I predicted that I wasn't going to keep participating in this thread.

Another egg-head theory busted wide open!

Predictions are tough, especially when they're about the future. (Yogi Berra, I think)

:-D

We missed you, for sure.

I did not think you could hold out as long as you did, I have quit it forever a few times, too.

And i will mkde a deal with you. Instead of repeating things you say that i think is unproven nonsense, i will just say Blah blah blah, if you will go back to using Global Warming, which describes your belief that the world is gettinng warmer, and stop hiding behind Climate Change, which describes what i believe, that the Climate Changes both ways.

You may be right about the Freon not warming the Earth, but what i thought was so stupid about banning it just in the United States, it was still available across the Mexican border for a dollar a pound, while we were paying 15 or 20 a pound. Ozone does not stop at the border, so if they could not ban it world wide, they should not have banned it just for us.

Ernie
..

Ernie, We got the desired result by a few countries banning it and we all benefitted from the effect on the ozone layer.

Nice to see you back, GG!

Steady, I hate to be skeptical, but our country and the ozone over it is a very small part of the world, and if removing that tiny fraction of the Freon fixed the entire world wide Ozone problem, it must not havbe been a very big problem in the first place.

I recall a lot of people did not believe the Ozone was disappearing, it was just moving. Remember there was a big hole in the ozone over Antartica and surely Freon did not cause that.

So many of these panics seem to not be as bad as first feared. Does anyone know if the Ozone over Mexico has disappeared because of Freon use down there?

Ernie