Muttling
Posts: 1612
Joined: 9/30/2007
Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: luckydog1
Muttling, you do have a fact wrong. The melting of Permafrost in the Artic is not making the oil companies happy. It is far harder to operate on thawed ground. The shorter winter seasons and melting is causing them huge expensive problems. It has not opened up any new areas at all. And an Ice free summer artic ocean would be a nightmare createing strong storms and waves/beach erosion.
Harder to operate in some areas, but suddenly possible in others. Why do you think the Russians planted a flag on the bottom of the ocean at the North pole this year? Are you familiar with the massive surge in research that is ongoing in northern Canada, the artic sea, and northern Russia right now?
The existing oil fields are getting more difficult to access because of what you describe. However, an estimated 20% of the world's oil reserves were previously unaccessible because of their artic locations. Now that massive reserve is coming available and a great many are striving to stake out their claims to it.
quote:
We know that the overall warming has been going for thousands of years.
No it has not and that statement confirms your failure to look into peer reviewed data instead of going to non-peer reviewed media for your data.
The true answer is that temperature has been cyclical for several thousands of years with warming and cooling periods occurring over spans as little as 1000 years or as long as 6000 years. The last "ice age" actually occurred during the middle ages.
What is different about today is the temperature is the highest it has been in about 70,000 years and it has risen to this level at a rate that FAR more rapid than anything seen in the historical record. We have multiple sources for the historical record but our best one is the ice in Antartica which dates back 600,000 years. In 600,000 years of data, we have never seen temperature rise at a right that is even remotely close to our current changes.
On the subject of CO2 versus mercury you are WAYYYYYY off the mark and about 20 years behind the science. A core of ice was drilled from Vostok Station in Antartica in the mid 1980's. The core was relatively shallow and only went back 170 years, but here's the graph comparing temperatures to carbon dioxide concentrations for the 170 years preceding 1985. The graph pretty much speaks for itself as to the connection.
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/xVostokCO2.htm
A more recent and more robust effort was called EPICA (European Program for Ice Coring in Antartica.) The data ultimately went back 650,000 years. Here's quick link providing the last 420,000 of data from EPICA and a longer (more involved link) discussing complete data:
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/seminars/990923FO.html
http://www.cio.state.ny.us/environmental%20concerns.pdf
NOW.....I feel I have provided you with the peer reviewed data that establishes as solid link between carbon dioxide and temperature. The link is not quite causal from a statistics perspective, but it's about as close as you can get without being causal. Sooooo, lets look at CO2 concentrations as reported by the U.S. observatory at Mauno Loa, Hawaii.
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/graphics_gallery/mauna_loa_record/mauna_loa_record_-_color.html
You'll notice that CO2 has been on a steady rise which appears to be accelerating since 1960.
The other thing to notice is that CO2 is currently in excess of 380 ppm and rising. Yet the historical record has never seen a CO2 level greater than 300 ppm.
Given the strength of the correlation of CO2 to temperature and the fact that we now have CO2 levels higher than have been seen in the past 650,000 years, mercury's potential for causing harm is pidly in comparison.
BTW....I hold degrees in civil and environmental engineering. I've spent the last 15 years cleaning up messes for the U.S. military. I've walked onto site after site and listened to the old timers say "You're not going to find anything here." Time and time again, I found it in less than 30 minutes of looking and it was a HUGE mess. To give you some good examples, I've dug unexploded mortar shells out of people's front yards when the old timer active duty folks said "We cleared the area, this is a waste of time."
This is a topic I know a good deal about and I don't take anyone (from either side) at their word. Show me the data that supports your claims concerning mercury as opposed to CO2. (P.S. - I've also cleaned up tons of free product mercury and mercury contaminated soil. It was heavily used by the Department of Energy in nuclear weapons development. Haven't done much with the mercury from electrical production plants and hydroelectric dams.)
quote:
My problems with Kyoto and the alarmists should not be intreprted as a desire to continue polluting. I honestly do not think CO2 is the worst pollutant to deal with, and that adressing more problematic pollutants like Mercury, would be better and have an effect on Co2 as a nice byproduct. The 2 large scale solutions under Kyoto are to build more nuclear plants world wide, which I heavily disagree with, and to send economic activity offshore, to China and Mexico bassically.
I do not understand why the American supporters of Kyoto want such a political and anti American worker policy, that is garunteed to continue to drive up CO2 emmissions, in conditions with more pollutants of other kinds and lower pay fewer rights for the employees. I understand perfectly why those who want to weaken American power and erode our standard of living do, and a qiute a few of them are socialist/communist.
It's far easier to deny the existance of a problem to be required to find ways to confront it.
And.....For the Record.....The U.S. belches out more CO2 than Mexico and China combined.
< Message edited by Muttling -- 12/13/2007 8:11:26 PM >
|
Scientists: Magma also to blame for melting ice - 
Profile
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread