Global Warming

[Ed Garrett]

What do you woodworkers think of global warming? Is it real? Is it natural? Can we stop it? Who do you think is to blame???

[Jim Becker]

Real. Natural cyclic, but exacerbated and accelerated by human endeavors. We may be able to mitigate some of the damage we have done to this point, but perhaps not all. There is no "who" to blame...any effect that humanity brought belongs to all of us...as does the responsibility to do what we can to reduce our impact on the climate of our planet. You and me will likely not suffer a lot of the ill effects, but future generations will.

IMHO, of course and the price was right!

[Gary Keedwell]

So called "global warming" is nothing caused by mankind and is only one of hundreds of up and down warming and cooling cycles. xxx

Without the so-called "global warming " billions of dollars of federal grant- research money would dry up. Almost all the so-called scientists who preach this mantra collect a government financed check every week.
That is my story and I'm sticking to it!!!
Gary K.

[Steven Triggs]

A few thoughts:

1. It is silly of us to think we have any idea where in the cycle the Earth is at the moment. We've been recording temperature for such a relatively miniscule time, whose to say that any trend we've noticed isn't just where things are at the moment. We know the earth went through major periods of heating and cooling historically, long before we were around.

2. If homo sapiens do actually play a major role in climate shifts, is that "unnatural?" We are animals, just like any others. If one day bears manage to eat all the fish in the rivers they eat from, would they sit around and blame themselves, or would they just find something else to eat?

3. Personally, I think it is arrogant for us, as insignificant an amount of time as we've been around, to think we play a significant part in Earth's development.

Anyway, my two cents, only worth about that much...

[Lee DeRaud]

Real. Natural cyclic, but exacerbated and accelerated by human endeavors. We may be able to mitigate some of the damage we have done to this point, but perhaps not all.

Exactly. That is the problem I have with the current arm-waving on the subject: I have yet to hear a convincing argument that the effect can be reversed. Everything being talked about now is intended to, at best, slow the effect down. And I'm not at all sure it's a good idea to dismantle civilization as we know it just to move the peak of the current cycle out a few hundred years.

[Randy Denby]

Some really good replies !!
Do ya'll remember back in the 70's they were preaching that the planet was cooling off?

[John Hain]

Michael Crichton wrote a book called "State of Fear". It's a decent read about one side of the issue. Granted it's full of fictional drama, but still interesting.

I can't even fathom a comment on the issue; this subject is beyond my educational background.

[Jim Becker]

Ok, there is a good chance to have a nice, intelligent and perhaps even spirited discussion here. That said, please keep in mind that the TOS does not allow political or religious discussion. Keep it respectful, too.

Jim
SMC Moderator

[Gary Keedwell]

Real. Natural cyclic, but exacerbated and accelerated by human endeavors. We may be able to mitigate some of the damage we have done to this point, but perhaps not all. There is no "who" to blame...any effect that humanity brought belongs to all of us...as does the responsibility to do what we can to reduce our impact on the climate of our planet. You and me will likely not suffer a lot of the ill effects, but future generations will.

IMHO, of course and the price was right!

Jim, whether you realize it or not, your post STARTED the political ball rolling. You stated that we should do things to reduce our impact on the climate of OUR planet.
...There is no scientific evidence that mankind has any effect what so ever on this planet's climate. ( which, by the way. is not "ours")
...By the very nature of the OP's question, in this political atmosphere, it is impossible NOT to talk political, therefore this whole thread will technically be against this forum's rules.
Most people who read newspaper's, listen to the radio, and , actually watch TV at nite, will have SOME political bias, one way or the other.
Respectfully,
Gary K.

[Greg Cuetara]

John, State of Fear was a great book....I think the most important thing it brought about was to think about everything and not take what anyone saying is fact...
Think about everything...form an opinion...argue one side passionately...

notice how I say passionately...not personally

Jim thanks for the reminder, you do a great job keeping us in line and and keeping us all civil

[Randy Denby]

My solution....send up a bunch of kitty liter to absorb the CO2 and run it thru a Bill penz cyclone. If that dont get it all, bring out the ducttape. Failing that, since the ocean is the majority offendor with chlorine, lets freeze it. I'll start gathering all the old evaporator coils to get started
Seriously, I'll look up the artcle I'm a bout to paraphrase and see if I can get a link to it. This article was written by a well know scientist in ASHRAE (American society of Heating Refrigeration Airconditioning engineers) His belief was basically, whats happening is natural and cyclic. What made him start investigating more tho was inside tip. Not sure if this tip was what started the global warming scare or just an opportunist to jump on the band wagon. Remember when this started? First thing to come under scrutiny was refigerants. R-12, R11, R500, R502 was banned. R-12 is monochloro diflouroethane ...Flourene/ Chlorine root cause.But these atoms are 4 times heavier than air...if anything they would go into the soil. They kept studying and researching and could not come up with a plausable reason for the scare.....Someone gave them a tip. It seems Duponts' patent was expiring on these refrigerants soon.Would they jump onn the bandwagon to condemn this refrigerant,develop new patented refrigerants to keep a monopoly? Surely not!!
oops, gotta go to bed, but will search for that article as it says it alot more eloquently than I

[Jesse Thornton]

Here's an excerpt from an article in The Independent that I think is worth a gander.

"Deniers' Myth Number One: Scientists are divided on whether man is causing global warming. In 2004, the universally-respected journal Science studied 928 randomly selected scientific papers containing the words "global climate change". None of them - not one - disagreed with the view that global warming is being caused to a significant degree by burning fossil fuels. As Jim Baker, who was head of one of the leading scientific organisations in the US, explains, "There is a better scientific consensus on this issue than any other, with the possible exception of Newton's Law of Dynamics."

Deniers' Myth Number Two: The current warming of the world is simply part of the planet's natural cycle. After all, there were no carbon emissions when the last ice age ended - why should the current warming be due to them? There is a sliver of truth in this: natural climate change has not stopped, and it never will. But we have superimposed onto it a great blast of greenhouse gases of our own, with far stronger effect.
To understand this, you only have to grasp some basic 19th-century physics. As Professor Chris Rapley of the British Antarctic Survey explains, "There are natural greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere which trap heat on the planet, keeping the surface temperature 30 degrees warmer than it otherwise would be. Since the start of the industrial revolution, we have released lots more greenhouse gases - around 1,000 billion tonnes of them. This has enhanced the natural greenhouse effect, and trapped more heat - currently 0.6 degrees. The more greenhouse gases we add, the warmer we'll be. It's not rocket science."

Deniers' Myth Number Three: The current warming in the world is all due to changes in the energy output of the Sun. In 1991, the Danish scientists Knud Lassen and Eigil Friis-Christensen found a correlation between temperature changes on Earth from 1850 onwards and sunspot activity, which usually indicate changes in the intensity of solar radiation. As the sun warmed, we warmed.
Other scientists studied this closely, and found out that they were partly right: up to 40 per cent of the planet's warming is indeed due to solar activity. But since 1980, sunspot activity has been declining - yet temperatures down here have been soaring to the highest levels ever recorded. So while the Sun can take some of the flak, the world's scientists agree: the other 60 per cent remains with us.

Deniers' Myth Number Four: In the 1970s, scientists were warning about "global cooling" and a looming Ice Age. How can we now trust these warnings of global warming? In fact, in the 1970s two - literally two - scientists tentatively suggested that cooling could occur over millennia. To compare that meek, misreported suggestion by two people to the overwhelming scientific consensus from tens of thousands of climatologists is, I am sure you deniers can see now, dishonest.

Denier's Myth Number Five: Global warming is a religion. People have always had an innate psychological need to believe in a looming apocalypse - this is just the latest version.
Precisely the opposite is the truth. Global warming is based on very close empirical observation of the real world, and deductions based on reason. If its conclusions fall into one particular niche in intellectual history, that doesn't change the fact they are true. It is you, the deniers clinging to myths, who resemble the faithful. Far from being Galileos, you have been siding with the fossil fuel Vatican.
Last year, there was an extraordinary exchange on the BBC's Newsnight between the environmentalist George Monbiot and the global warming denier Melanie Phillips. Monbiot pointed out that virtually all the "evidence" Phillips cites stems from people funded by Exxon-Mobil, a Big Oil corporation that has dedicated tens of millions of dollars to promoting denialist myths so they can carry on pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. "Could it be," Monbiot asked, "that you are an unwitting dupe of Exxon-Mobil?" Phillips replied, "It could be, it could be. I have no idea who funds the people I read and listen to."
No idea. She had lauded Ross McKittrick, funded by Exxon, for debunking environmentalist graphs. She had lauded, as invaluable experts, Dr Roy Spencer, Dr Richard Lindzen, the Cato Institute, the Tech Central Science Foundation and the George C. Marshall Institute - every one funded by Exxon."

[John Schreiber]

We are good at understanding things which we can see and feel. Woodworkers can feel a thousandth of an inch difference with their fingertips. Trying to use those same senses to understand small changes in temperature globally over millennia is beyond us. To observe those changes, we have to collect a lot of data and do careful analysis. The ways that data is collected and analyzed is not perfect, so even with our best work, we don't have any 100% conclusions.

The world is not dying, the world is changing. One question is how many people can live on a world with higher sea levels (less land) and higher temperatures (more desert).

It seems more than possible to me that human activities affect the climate. There are a lot of us and in just the last few hundred years, we have changed a lot about this world that we can see. We have also changed the world in ways we can't see, increased CO2 is the most relevant example.

It is possible that we could waste a lot of time and money trying to prevent or cure global warming. It is also possible that billions of people will die because we aren't doing enough now.

Be careful to examine your motives. Desire to stay in our present favored position where even the poorest of us live better than kings of the past can blind us to the facts.

Big topic. I look forward to seeing what others think

[Greg Funk]

Personally, I agree with the viewpoint expressed by NASA's chief scientist Michael Griffin in an interview with NPR:

Do you have any doubt that this is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with?
I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.

[Steven Triggs]

An interesting article. This particular scientist says Mars is experiencing the same trends as Earth, indicating the cause not being related to humankind...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...s-warming.html

Anyway, I'm not claiming I do or do not agree with the article, just thought it interesting...