Analogy – Steroids & Home Runs vs CO2 & Extreme Weather
I like the above video, though I would make a few changes if I could draw. For example, I would more carefully choose dimensions in the scene that shows the earth surrounded by what is apparently supposed to be the atmosphere. The earth’s diameter is roughly 8,000 miles, but its atmosphere is only a few miles thick. It should be a narrow band around the globe, not something that doubles the apparent size of the globe as it does in the animation.
It is also worth pointing out that steroids demonstrate another worthwhile answer to those people who continue to claim that CO2 is just a trace gas whose concentration of a few hundred parts per million cannot possibly have as big of an effect as climate scientists have warned us it is having. Think about the size of a home run hitting baseball player – probably 100-120 kilograms – and the size of a pill – perhaps a few hundred milligrams. The steroid concentration in that body mass is probably on the order of a few parts per million, but it can have a rather noticeable effect.
CO2 concentration increases may not cause individual weather events any more than the use of steroids causes individual home runs, but the probability of extreme weather increases with the concentration of CO2 like the probability of home runs increase with use of steroids.
Hat tip to ABC News (July 15, 2012) It’s Simple: Global Warming Is Causing the Extreme Weather and to Barry Brook @BraveNewClimate for pointing to the article.
re: ” It’s Simple: Global Warming Is Causing the Extreme Weather”
Rod its over; the train has left the station. Not even the crazies at the latest Rio boondoggle (Earth Summit 2012 — Rio +20) were talking up CO2 global warming or even much climate change. The watch word is sustainable development. In the document THE FUTURE WE WANT ( http://www.un.org/en/sustainablefuture/ ) which is the manifesto of the conference forty nine pages long “global warming” is used ONCE, “climate change” is mentioned 18 times and “Sustain” and its varients is used 600 times in the 49 page document.
Read U of Washington’s Professor Cliff Mass’s Texas Tall Tales and Global Warming to explain why you are so wrong on this subject. Keep working on Atomic Power.
Dan Kurt
Geez. Neanderthals had “sustainable” technology. their toolkit didn’t change for 200,000 years.
Rod.
I come to this site for factual analysis on Nuclear power, yet you ride on the back of the CO2 fraud promoted from the IPCC and the green movement. The same anti-nuclear green movement spawned from the early days of the Malthusian movement. I can go on and on and on.
It gives me the shits to be honest!
The human race should should adopt nuclear energy simply because it represents the human beings discovery of energy density, or energy flux density. The ability of the human mind to discover fuels which can provide an energy source to provide a growing world over and above an energy source such as fossil fuels and the pathetic renewable energy market.
We should go nuclear with the goal of nuclear fusion in the future. And the goal after that being matter and anti-matter power sources in a time frame from which we are probably close to death.
Please consider the following.
How to Build 6000 Nuclear Plants By 2050
http://www.google.com.au/url?q=http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%25202005/Nuclear2050.pdf&sa=U&ei=4vUGULLyN9GQiAeV75zICA&ved=0CBcQFjAC&usg=AFQjCNH052ylEBfA7DIDkS89QVnMGvcuLw
Please Rod, quit trying to tell the world that CO2 is a threat. It’s NOT!
I wish you all the best.
@Steve R W
If my acceptance of the risks of dumping 20 billion tons of CO2 per year into the atmosphere offends you, feel free to leave. It is not a fraud and not a belief system. I have reviewed enough of the science to get worried and to accept the fact that human actions over the past 150 years have changed the world’s atmospheric CO2 concentration AND that no one is quite sure what that will mean.
I am pretty sure there is a good reason why we discovered fission when we did.
Rod.
Fukushima and the event is being played as a catastrophic event. Where is your expertise in all this?
Please bring your expertise to the fore. You will read this with the ability to moderate so no one will read it.
Please take the front foot. But please do not suggest a trace gas represents a threat!
It’s up to you mate to comment when applicable. Barry Brook is in the same boat. I look to both of you factual commentary on nuclear power, yet you associate yourselves with the CO2 fraud.
Steve,
the only CO2 fraud there is is the idea that human emissions of billions of tons of the stuff is not affecting our climate. The world is warming, the burning of fossil fuels is causing it, and it will be bad, especially for poor nations. All three are proven beyond doubt by multiple independent lines of evidence.
You are right, and I think it’s unfortunate, that many “green” (I’ll never consider anti-nukes green, hence the quotation marks) groups is using the science of climate change to further a far-left agenda, but that doesn’t make the science any less real.
Ironically, I come across several pro-nuclear climate deniers on several fora, including this one, that will be more helpful in the fight against climate change than those “greens”, because they are still passionate about replacing fossil fuels with nuclear for other reasons, e.g. air pollution and energy security.
Generally I hold all anti-science people in contempt, including (but not limited to) climate deniers, creationists, anti-nukes, anti-GMOs, anti-vaxxers, alternative medicine people and people who claim to be electromagnetically hypersensitive. They’re all “same shit, different wrapping” IMO.
We had a similar issue a month ago when it was posted that those who fear the environmental consequences of exhaled breath may suddenly embrace nuclear power.
I said – it doesn’t matter then, and I still believe that is true.
Credibility issues come to mind. If they’ve been rabidly anti-nuclear without basis for decades – what should I, or any knowledgeable regard their disastrously flawed estimation of the global effects of Carbon Dioxide? Without consistency and credibility, people become propagandists, flying the flag of popular press and opinion.
Let’s break the mold of rhetoric and talk science for a minute. The Earth has 100,000 year cycles of Ice Ages separated by Global Warming. Man has been industrialized for the past two hundred years. The Earth heats and cools on schedule with or without smokestacks.
Is man made CO2 the culprit?
Is the solubility curve of CO2 in water vs temperature suggest:
1) effect (heated water emanates CO2 to atmosphere = both atmospheric CO2 and average temperature rise)
or
2) causation (greater CO2 causes the atmosphere and ocean temperatures to rise due to “Global Warming”)
That chicken or egg scenario is not settled by IPCC or its fervent adherents.
They chose to HIDE THE DECLINE but cannot hide their decline in credibility.
“How do we know that recent CO2 increases are due to human activities?”
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/how-do-we-know-that-recent-cosub2sub-increases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/
In brief, by direct accounting of carbon released into the atmosphere and well supported by the measured and on going change in C-13/C-12 ratio.
This is not scientifically contentious and you appear to be not well informed on this question. Look to your own credibility.
I don’t know who you quoted there. Sure we emit CO2 in industry.
If, by chance, you were responding to my post, allow me to clarify some things.
1) My post was about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Particularly, the fraudulent findings of the IPCC and their (Hide The) DECLINE in credibility.
2) Causation of Global Warming by CO2 is not conclusive. CO2 is emanated when the ocean is heated due to physical solubility characteristics. CO2 is similarly dissolved in the ocean when temperature lowers. Over Earth’s range of what we consider normal temperatures, that solubility changes by three times from 0 C to 40 C.
http://docs.engineeringtoolbox.com/documents/1148/solubility-co2-water.png
The oceans contain much more CO2 during Ice Ages.
The atmosphere contains much more CO2 when warming between these Ice Ages.
With or without man, smokestacks or industrial revolutions.
3) Geological records indicate the Earth heats and cools with 100,000 year Ice Age periodicity with or without industrial influence. Texas has been under the ocean three times, according to geologists due to NATURAL climate changes.
I’d hate to have the burden of convincing anyone of the veracity of AGW after that nasty IPCC fraud. I really don’t want to hear from them or their fan club. In my industry, we’ve banned people for lesser character issues than that.
Credibility is a big deal in nuclear. I prefer my industry cohorts stick to facts to avoid painting us with that phony IPCC green brush.