There was a Scientific American article, maybe a year ago. Last event when there was a similar amount of CO2 was 65 million years ago. Info was based on sedimentary cores from Antartica.

CO2 was from volcanic activity. One effect was ocean acidification which caused extinctions in the ocean, but mostly life was able to adapt.

There was warming, which then caused a lot of methane to be released from the artic and ocean bottom. This produced more warming. This is positive feedback.

One difference was it occurred over 1000 years rather than 100 years as is happening now so it's more difficult for life to adapt.

Bottom line, there were no mass extinction events or anything but it would sure be disruptive.

There's a lot of uncertainty from looking at 65 million year old sedimentary cores.

This is from my feeble memory, I probably have some details a little off.

How have I missed this thread?? I've been kicking myself for the slightest discourtesies on the other topics when I could've been slaying here?

Carbon Dioxide production stinks, except concrete (20% of all CO2 produced) which I really like for making things.

Electric cars mean we need more nuke plants unless someone has a better idea (read on).

When the first Indians (a term I have been assured by the local Ohlone chief is preferred by them) were going SUL around here (SF bay area), you could walk to the Farallon Islands because the sea level was 300 feet lower than it is now.

Estimates I've seen call for < 2m rise over 200 years. I think the world could use a pan-continental WPA to make dykes and land fills like the Dutch have done for a long time now.

Food is really the big problem. Production moves north and south, so the Canucks and Cossacks should be happy.

But cars stink. Smog stinks. Diesel generators stink. So I say work it so we don't have stinky pollutants.

The right technology:
1) Uses solar energy to produce a portable, dense energy store (H2 or, dare I say, short chain hydrocarbons) suitable for fueling your vehicle.
2) Can be adjusted to produce very long term stable carbon sinks (paraffin comes to mind) so we can monkey with CO2 levels to our heart's content.
3) Is reproducible on a massive, high efficiency scale so Exxon buys in.
4) But can also be scaled to personal production so the MyoGas folks can be smug in their MyoYurts.

There's also Tyvek Planet-Wrap....

Ty Ty
"I seem to remember in high school science class being told that any one of the numerous major volcanic eruptions that have happened throughout recorded history puts out many times more CO2 into the atmosphere than man has put out in the history of the industrialized world. Is there any truth to that or am I having selective memory or something?"

The IPCC uses a ludicrous method to come up with an annual figure due to volcanoes of 0.138 Gigatonnes per year globally.

Recent empirical measurement by Cardinelli et al find that Italy's lava fields alone produce some 9Gt/annum. The whole issue of how much of the increase of airborne co2 is down to human emission is up for grabs again.

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/uncertainty-the-origin-of-the-increase-in-atmospheric-co2/

Good points Nathan

If you live in some low lying poor country like Bangladesh, then it's going to be way worse.

We, in the West, that produced almost all the excess CO2 will be better able to adapt. Maybe we just abandon some lower lying areas like in Florida. Maybe the sea level rise will be less than some people fear.

Maybe it will take 1000 years for the total effect to be felt, and we won't see much in our lifetimes.

131 pages. impressive. I wanna play too.

Gonna drop keywords and catch phrases.

adapt like in the movie: Waterworld.

Populations are overgrown. with Hitler gone, nature will finish us off.

If you don't have kids, you are reducing your offspring carbon footprint, so it's OK to drive a fuel guzzler, you earned it. I earned it.

I've said before, I'll say it again, dig a trench and flood death valley, to offset the water melt surplus.

Look at Venice or the Philippines. Whole cities built on water. levels rise? no problem, just rise up to the challenge.

The HUGE advantage no one is talking about is that ANTARCTICA is land, after the snow melts and we round up the penguins in a zoo, it's all going to be rich villas, yacht docks and Starbucks. I don't like Starbucks, but rich people do.

More on ANTARCTICA:
it's full of oil, it's owned mostly by the Norwegians. they planted their flags. The British have some share too.

Good news: No polar bears on the south pole, so no need for bear spray or a Ruger LCR .357, well may be just no need for bear spray.

Water levels rise:
1) the Cuba/US problem takes care of itself, as Cuba becomes a marine preserve.
2) India data centers are flooded, IT jobs return to North America and Europe.
3) deserts will be wetter, so I will not need to carry 200 oz on my back like a camel.
4) deserts will be the new green farmland.
5) Being exiled to Siberia will be really nice climate.
6) the whole Africa drought problem : resolved.

Roger,

Very creative and entertaining.

Daryl

From Ty Ty: "I seem to remember in high school science class being told that any one of the numerous major volcanic eruptions that have happened throughout recorded history puts out many times more CO2 into the atmosphere than man has put out in the history of the industrialized world. Is there any truth to that or am I having selective memory or something?"


http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2827

http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm

Edited by wildlife on 05/18/2012 14:16:03 MDT.

It doesn't take human involvement on such a grand scale to really mess stuff up.

"This is an incredible cascade," said researcher Rodolfo Dirzo, a professor of environmental science and senior fellow with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "As an ecologist, I am worried about the extinction of ecological processes. This dramatically illustrates the significance of such extinctions."

Study from one of those "not to be trusted sources", (sarcasm font)

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/may/land-sea-ecology-051712.html

Sure looks like a pile of seagull crap to me.

Stanford University: Global Warming Central.
Science by press release.
The ghost of Stephen Schneider is restless.
His Stanford website is still up. They are in denial of his passing.

He's no match for the ghost of John Daly though.
http://www.john-daly.com/schneidr.htm

Jerry says:

"If you live in some low lying poor country like Bangladesh, then it's going to be way worse."

The silt coming down the Brahmaputra has *increased* Bangladesh's land area, more than offsetting the sea level rise, which is at the same ~2mm/year it has been since tidal records began in the C19th if you go by Envisat and tide gauges rather than the warmists at Colorado Edu who have calibrated their satellite altimetry to a model instead of measured reality.

The immediate dangers to Bangledesh do not appear to be sea level rise but Climate variability and the way Bs agriculture will be affected, if they survive flooding;

See Floods in Bangladesh in Wikipedia.

Of course, as we know, there has always been climate variability - nothing new there! HA hahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahaah!

The latest climate/environmental news; CO2 concentrations are reading 400ppm over the Arctic now.

http://weathernationheadlines.blogspot.com/2012/05/june-1-severe-risk-east-coast-co2.html

Edited due to Climate Change and excessive laughter.

Edited by wildlife on 06/08/2012 19:09:45 MDT.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-kochfunded-climate-change-skeptic-reverses-course-20120729,0,7372823.story

"The verdict is in: Global warming is occurring and emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity are the main cause.

This, according to Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at UC Berkeley, MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project."

on a less scientific note, there are many causes and effects, that have ripple effects in human behavior regarding energy consumption.

example:
when the weather is extremely cold, or hot, there is a higher demand for electricity because of air conditioning cooling or heating homes and buildings. Many electricity generation companies still depend on burning coal, which generates heat and pollution.

So when the climate changes, the quantity of energy units demanded will adjust accordingly. Sometimes making it worse, other times better, in reasonably nice weather demand for energy units will drop, less coal burning -> less heat generated.

But the root cause for a spike in consumption is over population, regardless of which stage in the industrial revolution.
Less people on the planet means less diapers, less need for farming, less drivers, less cars, less factory output, less soda drinkers, less poo in the sewer to flush in the river and ocean, and eventually, less space in cemetery.

You have children? You are part of the eco problem.
Someone else has more than 2 offspring per woman - future ecological disaster.

So it turns out that sabertooth tigers and camels were dominant in North America, well nature "fixed the glitch in the Matrix"

Nature will hit reset button again every couple of thousand years.

Happy Monday!

The main problem with Muller's study is that he uses the GHCN data without looking into the adjustments it had been subjected to before he got it...

Prof Judith Curry says in the Guardian today:

"the method used to attribute the warming to human emissions is way over-simplistic. I don't think this question can be answered by the simple curve fitting used in this paper, and I don't see that their paper adds anything to our understanding of the recent warming."

You go girl. She should know, she was on Muller's team for a while until she saw how they were going about it.

Edited by tallbloke on 07/31/2012 04:07:13 MDT.

RE: Muller article in the NY Times.
If you look into the history of Muller you will find he never was a skeptic. He has been taken to task by many, including Michael Hockeystick Mann, for inaccuracies and assumptions in that article, which originally ran in the New York Times. Other members of the BEST team have also been critical of the Muller article. There is always more behind everything written on this subject, and that goes for all views. A very very uncertain and evolving area of research. A peer reviewer of BEST, responding to Muller's NY Times article. I am just posting this to show there are other views and issues. Press releases are often very misleading to what a scientific study actually found. Much of the time the author of the press release leaves out cautionary sections and only goes for the sensational and rarely if ever looks for contrary evidence for whatever the study or paper may be looking at. As always caveat emptor.

NEW ITEMS (as of July 30 2012)

BERKELEY EARTH STUDY REFEREE REPORTS: On September 8 2011 I was asked by Journal of Geophysical Research to be a reviewer for a paper by Charlotte Wickham et al. presenting the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature ("BEST") analysis of the effect of urbanization on land surface temperatures. This work is mainly associated with Richard Muller and his various coauthors. I submitted my review just before the end of September 2011, outlining what I saw were serious shortcomings in their methods and arguing that their analysis does not establish valid grounds for the conclusions they assert. I suggested the authors be asked to undertake a major revision.
In October 2011, despite the papers not being accepted, Richard Muller launched a major international publicity blitz announcing the results of the "BEST" project. I wrote to him and his coauthor Judy Curry objecting to the promotional initiative since the critical comments of people like me were locked up under confidentiality rules, and the papers had not been accepted for publication. Richard stated that he felt there was no alternative since the studies would be picked up by the press anyway. Later, when the journal turned the paper down and asked for major revisions, I sought permission from Richard to release my review. He requested that I post it without indicating I was a reviewer for JGR. Since that was not feasible I simply kept it confidential.
On March 8 2012 I was asked by JGR to review a revised version of the Wickham et al. paper. I submitted my review at the end of March. The authors had made very few changes and had not addressed any of the methodological problems, so I recommended the paper not be published. I do not know what the journal's decision was, but it is 4 months later and I can find no evidence on the BEST website that this or any other BEST project paper has been accepted for publication. [Update July 30: JGR told me "This paper was rejected and the editor recommended that the author resubmit it as a new paper."]
On July 29 2012 Richard Muller launched another publicity blitz (e.g. here and here) claiming, among other things, that "In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects [including those related to urbanization and land surface changes] unduly biased our conclusions." Their failure to provide a proper demonstration of this point had led me to recommend against publishing their paper. This places me in an awkward position since I made an undertaking to JGR to respect the confidentiality of the peer review process, but I have reason to believe Muller et al.'s analysis does not support the conclusions he is now asserting in the press.
I take the journal peer review process seriously and I dislike being placed in the position of having to break a commitment I made to JGR, but the "BEST" team's decision to launch another publicity blitz effectively nullifies any right they might have had to confidentiality in this matter. So I am herewith releasing my referee reports. The first, from September 2011, is here,( http://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/referee_report.pdf ), and the second, from March 2012 is here,( http://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/2nd_review.pdf ).

Edited by mtnrat on 07/31/2012 19:16:25 MDT.

I heard that Anthony Watts is blaming NOAA for the Midwest drought - he blames NOAAs poor placement of NOAA weather sensing instruments for the severe drought.

Nice try at trolling. "I heard" lol
Here is the press release on Watts et al findings.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/watts_et_al_2012-press-release-r1.pdf

Making a joke is not the same as trolling.

I'm drawing a distinction between silly-talk about heat-islands and such and the reality of the US drought. Some people can talk nothing but baloney, especially if it's their job. I read that North and South Korea are in drought as well, and I read that India was suffering as well......Russia, Australia - they all put their weather instruments in the wrong spots!

Edited by wildlife on 08/01/2012 19:19:53 MDT.

It's the nature of weather that at any one time, some parts of the world are drier than usual, some parts are wetter than usual, and some parts are about average.

Parts of the U.S. have been drier than normal this summer. Britain and northern Europe got a soaking.

The issues regarding the siting of temperature sensors are completely separate to the occurrence of droughts. Dan either seeks to conflate them and confuse the discussion, which is trollish behaviour. Or he genuinely understands so little about the climate debate that he needs to get himself better informed before sounding off about people who have been studying this stuff for years.

John Christy, who runs the UAH temperature dataset along with Dr Roy Spencer, which is based on satellite data appeared before the senate committee on the U.S. heatwave yesterday had this to say:

"During the heat wave of late June and early July, high temperature extremes became newsworthy. Claims that there were thousands of records broken each day and that “this is what global warming looks like” got a lot of attention.

However, these headlines were not based on climate science. As shown in Figure 1.3 of my testimony it is scientifically more accurate to say that this is what Mother Nature looks like, since events even worse than these have happened in the past before greenhouse gases were increasing like they are today.

Now, it gives some people great comfort to offer a quick and easy answer when the weather strays from the average rather than to struggle with the real truth, which is, we don’t know enough about the climate to even predict events like this.

A climatologist looking at this heat wave would not be alarmed because the number of daily high temperature records set in the most recent decade was only about half the number set in the 1930s as shown in my written testimony. I suppose most people have forgotten that Oklahoma set a new record low temperature just last year of 31 below. And in the past two years, towns from Alaska to my home state of California established records for snowfall. The recent anomalous weather can’t be blamed on carbon dioxide"

Edited by tallbloke on 08/02/2012 00:36:32 MDT.

From Sean Staplin's link above to the Watts et al 2012 paper press release.

Using Leroy 2010 methods, the Watts et al 2012 paper, which studies several aspects of USHCN siting issues and data adjustments, concludes that:

These factors, combined with station siting issues, have led to a spurious doubling of U.S. mean temperature trends in the 30 year data period covered by the study from 1979 - 2008.

Other findings include, but are not limited to:

 Statistically significant differences between compliant and non-compliant stations exist, as well as urban and rural stations.

 Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.

 Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.

 Urban sites warm more rapidly than semi-urban sites, which in turn warm more rapidly than rural sites.

 The raw data Tmean trend for well sited stations is 0.15°C per decade lower than adjusted Tmean trend for poorly sited stations.

 Airport USHCN stations show a significant differences in trends than other USHCN stations, and due to equipment issues and other problems, may not be representative


Dan might well seek to make 'a joke' out of the findings, but it looks pretty important to people who understand how the co2 global warming scare has evolved.

To date the U.S. taxpayer has been required to spend over 120 BILLION DOLLARS on researching and combating 'global warming'. A similar sum of taxpayers money has been used by the European Union on propping up the currently flatlining 'carbon market' shares trading system. Pretty funny joke for the taxpayer huh Dan?

Qui bono?