Bruupo’s Recent Comments

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  Some of this should be obvious

  "I (maybe incorrectly) would guess that water in clouds has a bigger effect on global warming than any amount of CO2."

  It's not about being incorrect, it's about putting the carriage before the horse. Water exists in basically a finite amount in a closed system, it does not simply decide to go up in the clouds, something has to put it there. CO2 is not a finite constant in our system, it's existence in our atmosphere is almost totally as a byproduct of organic life, and it's concentrations can vary based on that source, unlike water. The amount of water absorbed and held by living beings is trivial compared to the total amount of water on the globe.

  "Like i don't need to know about the earth's orbit around the sun nor an over active imagination to assume it will get warmer in the spring. The cycles are not identical and they don't have to. The 3500 years cycle is the result of several other shorter cycles and then the max and min may slide."

  Right, well the papacy once had an active imagination, but screw Copernicus. Did anyone notice he outlined a quarter annual phenomenon, an annual phenomenon, and the longest phenomenon addressed, 3,500 years...

  3,500 years is nothing in geologic time. Nothing. It certainly isn't enough to make concrete predictions on, you aren't considering the number of variables for a second. When you look at a geologically significant time period, all kinds of crazy shit has happened to and in our climate. Hell, even the old Testament had a flood that probably doesn't correspond to that cycle ;)

  Take, for example, the eruption of a giant calderra volcano. The last time a really really big one went was 75,000 years ago in Java, and it had such a severe impact on the worldwide human habitat that our ancestors were bottlenecked from a population of millions to around 15,000 individuals.

  Yellowstone could erupt tomorrow. You go far enough on those cycles some people seem so sure of, and these giant eruptions and impact events happen all the time.

  We can't prepare for those, but the ingenuity and perseverance that has seen 6 billion humans descend from the 15,000 who barely survived an unbelievably harsh climate aught to mean something to us. It would be cartoonish to throw away everything they clung to so desperately simply by not admitting what is we are doing.

  Anyone who believes the earth is our garunteed safe home, stocked with resources for our use, has only a religious understanding of science or our world. That kind of understanding was as misguided and useless in Copernicus' time as it is now.

  People who can't accept a scientific consensus in this day and age should definitely turn off their computers, they must be run by black magic, after all.
  On 'Global warming is part of a natural cycle'--This idea is one short step above appealing to magic posted 2 years, 9 months ago 39 Responses

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  Has no one here seen "Dimming Sun"?

  There was a reason cooling was predicted then, they were right. If we had continued then to eject particulate matter into the air at the rate we were, and increased it at the rate of industrialization, the planet would likely be cooler now and the greenhouse effect would have been delayed but still inevitable.

  We cleaned the soot out of the air in relatively short order because it was so relatively simple to do, one of those things industry could have been doing all along without dire consequences. Of course, they didn't, because there were pennies to be saved and capitalism's short term goals are always opposed to long term environmental goals without Gov't intervention.

  Now that there is less particulate matter in the air, the CO2 greenhouse phenomenon is accelerated and more noticeable, and there are scientists who believe reflecting sunlight through high altitude emission of sulfur dioxide may be the only way to reverse the process.

  Was the theory all the rage in the 1970's, was it on every channel like global warming is now? Who cares, they were right then and they are right now. The thing no one here seems to remember is that in between 1970 and now there has been a whole lot of ACTION, not just idle theorizing. Namely, the Clean Air Act, and you can visibly trace back the date it was passed in the layers of antartic ice cores.On 'They predicted global cooling in the 70s'--But that didn't even remotely resemble today's consensus posted 2 years, 9 months ago 29 Responses