Who is right? The climate alarmists? Or the Climate deniers?

Policy decisions should only be made based on complete information. When we make economic policy we should consider the ways in which that policy (or refraining from implementation of policy) will positively and negatively affect individuals and society. Same should be done with climate policy.

 

I will address your points as follows:

1. Natural Systems and CO2 Balance: You rightly point out that rainforests, algae, and other vegetation have historically balanced out CO2 levels. However, the current rate of CO2 emissions far exceeds the capacity of these natural systems to offset. The rapid increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, primarily from burning fossil fuels, is at an unprecedented rate. This has led to CO2 concentrations not seen in millions of years, and the natural systems can't cope at the pace you're seeing the environment change.
   
   
2. Human-Induced Changes vs. Natural Changes: While Earth's climate has indeed gone through cycles of warming and cooling over millions of years, the current change is largely due to human activity and is occurring at a rate much faster than most natural changes. This rapid shift leaves less time for ecosystems and species to adapt, resulting in ecological disruptions and extinctions.
   
   
3. Urbanization and Megacities: Your concerns about urbanization leading to the loss of vegetation and increased concrete structures are valid. However, urbanization also has its benefits in terms of energy efficiency. Compact cities are generally more energy-efficient than sprawled-out developments. Efficient public transportation, reduced heating costs due to shared walls, and shorter commutes can make urban living more carbon-efficient than suburban or rural lifestyles.
   
   
4. CO2 Emissions and Deforestation: While deforestation is undeniably a major concern, focusing solely on it while dismissing the significance of CO2 emissions is a bit misguided. Both are critical issues that need to be addressed. The argument doesn't have to be "either-or." Addressing CO2 emissions does not mean ignoring deforestation.
   
   
5. Legislation and Human Behavior: You argue that we can't "legislate" human nature. However, legislation has historically been a tool to guide human behavior for the greater good, be it laws related to public health, safety, or environmental protections. While we can't force people to adopt specific lifestyles, regulations can create incentives or disincentives that encourage sustainable behaviors which makes it a worthwhile effort, and not warranting your 'shouting at clouds' characterization, which suggests a do nothing other than hopefully individuals living an eco friendly approach. We can do both.
   
   
6. Personal Responsibility vs. Collective Action: While your personal choices are commendable and represent a low-carbon lifestyle, climate change is a collective issue. Individual actions, while important, must be complemented by systemic changes that can be achieved through policies, technological innovations, and broader societal shifts.
   
   
7. Motorcycles as a Solution: Motorcycles indeed have benefits in terms of fuel economy and space, but they might not be a viable solution for everyone due to factors like climate, family size, or work requirements. Advocating for a diverse range of sustainable transportation options might be more realistic.
   
   
8. Addressing the Tone: It's important to acknowledge your genuine concern for the environment. Your hands-on approach and personal lifestyle choices clearly show commitment. However, the complexities of climate change require multifaceted solutions that extend beyond individual actions.
   

In summary, while you bring up valid concerns about deforestation and urbanization, these can't be used to diminish the significance of addressing CO2 emissions. Both anthropogenic CO2 emissions and habitat loss are critical and intertwined issues that contribute to the broader challenge of climate change. Effective solutions will likely require addressing both, along with many other environmental and societal challenges.

 

I am not some kind of "Gia worshiping tree hugger", however the planet does seem to have a "natural temperature" it wants to fall into, and nature always seems to evolve a way to keep that in balance.

And I think the ultimate stupidity of the "AGW crowd" is their absolute refusal to recognize that the temperature of our planet is far below the norm. Permanent ice caps are an extreme aberration on our planet, and have almost never existed other than in the last 2.5 million years or so. SO you take a planet of over 4.5 billion years, and suddenly assume the current extreme cold we are going through is the norm and it should never heat up ever again beyond what it was a century ago during a cold snap.

That to me is the ultimate in stupidity, it is like assuming the temperature of your house should be the same as inside your refrigerator.

I see most of the charts of temperature, and just want to shake my head in disgust. They normally only go back a few thousand years, and give an extremely distorted idea to people of what the temperature of our planet should be. WHen I look at things like "normal temperature", this is more like what I look for:



And by looking at that chart, it should become immediately obvious that we are far below the temperature that the planet is normally at, and where it is trying to take us. Invert the temperatures above and below the line, and the planet actually wants to be at around the same temperature above the current one as the current one is in the height of an ice age. Our planet is so hot normally that when Pangea broke up and Antarctica traveled to its present location (still attached to South America and Australia), it was a semi-tropical landscape. That is why we only really have marsupials in South America and Australia (other than a few on NA). No ice caps at all on the South Pole, that was how our planet was for billions of years. The extreme cold we are now in has really only been seen during the Cryogenian, when almost all life on the planet was snuffed out.

This is why I laugh whenever somebody calls me a "denier". They do not even understand that to me, the planet is most likely trying to return to the "extreme temperatures" that it has resided at for most of its existence, but is trapped in an extreme cold cycle so instead keeps moving back and forth like a sick person with alternating fever and chills. And we are only in this cycle because of a fluke of geology that has broken up our continents so where we have two disconnected oceans separated by landmasses that run almost from pole to pole.

And that if the planet was to return to what it is most comfortable at, which would be around 10c higher than it is now if not more (80f). Where the average global winter temperature will be around 15c (60f), and snow will once again become an extremely rare thing only seen at the highest altitudes.

So when ever somebody screams I am a "denier", I simply want to laugh in their face and go "Here, hold my beer...."

 

But is the CO2 rising faster than the capacity?

Once again, realize that the science I study the most is actually geology. And we have had some eras where volcanism has pumped out extreme amounts of CO2. That was how we were finally able to escape the Cryogenian after all. And throughout most of the history of the planet, both the CO2 levels and temperatures were a hell of a lot higher than they are now. The only reason we are seeing such low temperatures is that the continents are broken up and dividing the oceans. That is not a permanent arrangement, and it is inevitable that we will once again see a supercontinent and most of the life on the planet will actually die off.

But anybody that says it has never happened before or is happening faster now than ever before to be honest is lying. Because we know changes have happened even more extreme in the past.

False connection there. You are basing that on the assumption that such large congregations of humans in a single location is normal behavior. It is not, we evolved in conditions where we were almost exclusively congregated into extended family groups of no more than a couple of dozen individuals. Only being large enough to add in genetic diversity and some exchange with other groupings to prevent inbreeding.

"Civilization" so far is only a fad you might say, our natural "behavior in the wild" is small packs of individuals, not hundreds of thousands to millions living in a relatively small area of land.

And this can even be seen in how freaking hard it was for humans to make the leap to where we are today. It happened in Eurasia, but it largely failed in the Americas. Both North and South America remained for thousands of years in a Neolithic level, each time a group would start to rise high enough in population to start to build permanent cities, famine, war, and disease normally wiped them out and threw them right back to being nomadic wanderers again. And the largest killer of humans for thousands of years was those three things.

Especially when we finally saw our population close in on 100 million people in the Middle Ages. Diseases ravaged the three major continents and in some areas wiped out as high as half the population. And that is the exact same thing seen in animals. Put too many animals in an environment, and the result is starvation and disease. I don't care if its rabbits, deer, wolves, or humans. Nature always has a way to try and balance the wildlife with the environment.

But because of "technology", we have eliminated most diseases. And we can provide food and water to areas that should never have such high populations. At the expense of destroying the environment.

OK, fine. Then tell me how you "legislate" China to stop building so many coal power plants. How do you "legislate" to stop the massive Amazon deforestation?

There is a vast difference between "legislate", and "actually doing something even remotely effective". And until and unless you can address things like that, the stupid petty things like ordering people to stop using plastic bags is the ultimate in mental masturbation. It makes some people feel good, but really does nothing.

But I will close with this. I think the temperature rise is 100% natural. And that it is going to get so much warmer than even the most extreme AGW fanatics believe. We will lose the Arctic Ice Cap, almost all the tundra and permafrost, even the ice cap in Greenland will shrink to almost nothing. Almost all of Florida will sink below the ocean. And there is not a damned thing we can do about it because not only does that happen in every interglacial, that is closer to the actual temperature of the planet.

And that humans can almost be seen as an infection, as we have grossly overpopulated our planet. And until we can return our numbers to a more rational level, things like COVID and other diseases will continue until one finally does knock us right back on our asses population wise. Probably ideally our planet without massive changes to the environment could support around 1 billion people. And when the planet had populations of 1 billion or lower even when we did extreme damage to the environment, it was so small that the planet could heal itself as we moved to another area. But with a population of over 8 billion, we are stripping resources and damaging the environment much faster than the planet can recover from that.

So unless some catastrophe comes along and kills off 7 out of 8 humans, expect that to continue. And trust me, there is absolutely no way you are ever going to "legislate" human reproduction and pass laws ordering our eventual depopulation to sustainable levels. We are the pack of tens of thousands of rats right now, destroying the village of Hamelin.

 

A million years is a nonsensical scale.

Earth's population has risen dramatically since a million years ago and we've built our world around temperature and sea level averages over the last hundred years and those averages are changing.

If we had your million years to adapt, that would certainly change the equation. That's where your denial comes in.

 

Those whose only response to data showing that the climate catastrophe narrative is untrue is name calling are the true “deniers” of science and natural history.

 

All of the flora and fauna currently populating the Earth evolved when atmospheric CO2 was greater than 1000 ppm. All of those species have adapted to much lower concentrations.

BTW the huge increase in the standard of living which has taken place in the last ~ 100 years is due to fossil fuels which have large amounts of energy stored within unlike a solar panel which has zero energy stored within.

 

The evolution you speak of did not take place in 100 years.

[/QUOTE]
Fossil fuels, solar and wind are technologies for creating energy, not storing it.

Today one can install home solar and a battery capable of making a home independent or nearly independent of the grid. In fact, in many places the utility will pay you for your solar energy that you put back on the grid.

The cheapest energy to produce today is by wind. Nuclear would be great, but so far nuclear energy costs more than any other method.

 

Actually, I would date it back even farther than that.

Before we had steam power, there was actually a hell of a lot of "industrialization" based on water and wind. The waterwheel for powering machines dates at least as far back as 200 BCE, and both the Greeks and Romans made use of it. For a great many uses, including grinding grain, kneading dough, and manufacturing the equipment of the Roman Legions.

Many do not know that most of the equipment for the legions came from large workshops that produced standardized equipment to outfit tens of thousands of soldiers. Almost all powered by water or wind. And they were producing large amounts of iron in foundries that used water power hammers to beat the raw ore, not unlike what was used 2,000 years later using steam.

However, like so many human cultures, they would pass into a "dark age", and that technology would be lost. Only to be rediscovered again centuries later. And many of those "dark ages" tended to come at either the instigation of overpopulation, disease, or climate change (especially global cooling). The massive expansion of the Bronze Age Warm Period allowed the Greek civilization to thrive, innovate, and expand. But the end of that in the "Iron Age Cold Epoch" brought down the Greek Empire, as well as others including the Etruscans and allowed the Romans to rise. Where they then surpassed the earlier cultures, especially during the Roman Warm Period. Which ended about a century before the fall of the Roman Empire, when the "Dark Ages" started and much was lost again.

And I already mentioned the problems NA and SA had with that. Over and over on those continents we had civilizations rise, but each time something did such a hard reset to them that almost all of the technology was completely lost and they had to start all over again. And I think that is ultimately tied to the lower population density and geographical barriers that prevented large scale spreading of technology and concepts. Some things like bronze and the wheel were known in the Americas, but they never spread beyond toys or ornaments in any of the cultures that developed them. Unlike in Eurasia where they sometimes drove the various cultures to higher development.

 

Fossil fuels, solar and wind are technologies for creating energy, not storing it.

Today one can install home solar and a battery capable of making a home independent or nearly independent of the grid. In fact, in many places the utility will pay you for your solar energy that you put back on the grid.

The cheapest energy to produce today is by wind. Nuclear would be great, but so far nuclear energy costs more than any other method.[/QUOTE]

Of course it didn’t. That’s the point.

Fossil fuels (or any other fuel) do not create energy. Thermodynamics 101.

How much do these batteries cost, how big are they, what is there lifetime, and how much CO2 is emitted during their manufacture? If the full cost of energy is calculated wind and solar fail miserably.

If wind energy is so cheap why is the cost of electricity in Germany 3X that in the USA? Why are low income German families forced to choose between eating and staying warm?

 

Sure but the standard of living really took off when coal and oil were used to generate electricity.

 

Those fuels are used to create electric energy. Usually, people shorten that to creating energy unless there is something more specific going on.

Batteries for home power are not cheap, but they do pay off by saving solar for later use or selling it to the grid. Also, they protect against being cut off from the grid by the various kinds of failures.

Germany paid a LOT for switching away from nuclear. That included adding coal, which they are working to reduce as part of their CO2 objective. Today, 2022 German energy creation as described by wiki - wind+solar is about 37%. Coal+gas is about 42%. Hydro, biofuel, remaining nuclear are the rest.

 

That past industry didn't compare to what is known as the industrial revolution - given that name due to it's phenomenal impact on history.

 

All of our “energy” is “nuclear” in origin. The vast majority is from fusion reactions. A little bit from fission. We have come up with various ways to utilize and store this nuclear energy. From storage in thermal gradients to organic molecules etc. etc.

 

I hate to say this,but tools that use batteries suck. And battery packs are different. Not only different but expensive to buy.

 

Your massive glaring logical failure there is your inability to grasp geological time scales. The topic being discussed is human-caused climate change over a span of decades, and you're declaring that's not something worth looking at because of processes that take hundreds of millions of years.

Then there's your cherrypicking over what the "right" temperature is supposed to be. You don't say it's molten earth or snowball earth. You conveniently pick a more recent past ... but not too recent. Can you explain why you picked that specific time frame to be the "right" temperature of the earth?

And there's your very odd way of anthropomorphizing a hunk of rock. The earth doesn't "want" anything. If humans make the earth warmer, the earth will do nothing about it, because the earth is not sentient.

This thread also illustrated the flaw in your "BUT I HAVE LINKS!" argument. You'll link to something unrelated to the current topic, and then declare that because your links are correct, that proves your totally unrelated point. No, that's not how it works.

You think emotionally, not rationally. That's an observation, not an opinion.

 

And fossil fuels don’t need batteries because they can be used to supply energy on demand 24/7.

You ignore the details on home batteries which is typical of alarmists.

And apparently you are okay with the economic damage done to low income families in Germany. Which again is typical of alarmists.

Capacity is not the same as utilization. This important distinction is again typical of alarmists.

I have given you references which quantify all these concepts. Refusal to take advantage of the learning contained within is indicative of a faith based belief in a global warming narrative driven by human CO2 emissions. Why not challenge your beliefs?

 

And more of the faith based narrative above.

 

Once again, I would say that is very wrong.

I would link it to coal and oil producing steam. That reduced the dependence on creating machines that operated based on wind or water.

And none of the steam engines of the "Industrial Revolution" created electricity. They all drove belts, cams, and shafts to enable the operation of machines. That was all a century before electricity was harnessed.

The first power plant did not come about until 1882. But we had been using steam to power many things starting in the late 1600s.

 

Wow. Still lying about me across multiple threads? And still too afraid to say my name?

You could have just debated me in that one thread, you know.

Oh wait, you _couldn't_ debate me. That's the whole point. That's why you ran and pulled this sleaze.

You know what's awesome about being on the rational side? I just point to the data, and I "win". Like this:

https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/paleoclimate-the-end-of-the-holocene/



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum

 

Don't worry.

You're a denier, so everyone expected some cowardly insult-and-run sleaze. That means you didn't disappoint anyone.

Care to address the content?

 

I (and many others) have.

 

I get it - some like battery powered tools and some are better on 110 or gas powered.

The home batteries are different in that they are wired into your house electric system (so no separate sockets, or whatever) and they just sit there and work.

They'll tell you if the grid went down, so you can be more careful about usage.

 

A lot of us have heat pumps, which are more cost efficient than gas or oil except in seriously cold areas.

Germany? They went through a lot of expense to reduce nuclear, because nuclear power is expensive.

The cheapest new power to add is wind. So, it's not surprising that Germany is pushing that direction.

 

Nuclear is also dependable; wind - not so much.