CO2 - Dumb question

That small quantities often make a big difference shouldn't be a surprise:

• Pure water is an electrical insulator yet adding a single crystal of Common Salt turns a ton of water into a conductor.
• Iron is too soft and malleable to be useful. Adding 0.05% of carbon turns Iron into mild-steel. And between 0.6 and 1.4% carbon creates a range of tool steels with very different properties.
• Vitamins
• Botulin Toxin is about 40 million times more deadly than Hydrogen Cyanide. If 100 people are each given an 80 nanogram dose, 50 of them will die.
• One sperm...

Ady is guilty of applying "common sense" to the wrong problem. It's true that diluting nasty things often renders them harmless but unfortunately not true of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. Not a matter of conjecture, opinion, or belief; it's easy to measure the green-house effect of gases in a laboratory.

The scientific theory behind global warming is backed by plenty of evidence that's been getting stronger for at least thirty years. If someone has an alternative, I'd like to see the data and reasoning. Wishful thinking, distrust, ignorance and conspiracy theories are poor ways of tackling a technical problem.

Dave

Ah, but pure iron does come into its own - in electrical motors, generators and transformers. Not for its mechanical, but its magnetic, properties.

Good think then the stuff I nearly gassed myself with once, working alone in a plating works (the manager was visiting a customer) was only Hydrogen Cyanide, not some Essence of Botulinum.

The serious point about climate change though, was first raised some 100 years ago.....

Interesting you chose 30 years of scientific support Dave. Just after the last panic of a coming ice age as enthusiastically supported by climate experts writing to Presidents, was falling out of favour.

I doubt if there ever was a settled climate. Neither do I doubt that man is having an impact .

Dismissal of inconvenient facts such as no climate model having predicted the last 30 years climate accurately ( many wrong by orders of magnitude) and the historical evidence of a medieval warming period (sans CO2). Sidelining the dust bowl years in America and ignoring the discovery of varieties of oats ,now only growable in a mediterranean climate, in neolithic Scara Brae Orkney, all give me cause to doubt the current orthodoxy . The settled orthodoxy of the geocentric model started with Eudoxus and through Ptolemy was accepted for 1500 years.Famously sceptics or "deniers" such as Copernicus came unstuck for promoting alternative views. Disgracefully, Eugenics was accepted by a large part of the scientific community in the 1920s as evidenced.

So "settled science" despite its high self regard has feet of clay and I would be much more receptive to the arguments if the anomalies were explained rather than dismissed.

When your species evolves to sapiens and you discover that you are living in an ice age interglacial, it would seem to make sense to warm the place up, not cool it down

Robin -

Very witty - though have you mixed up the two phases of an ice-age?

The interglacial is the warm period between the cold glacial ones, over many tens of thousands of years; so we do not want it the present interglacial warming even more.....

As for our species calling itself H. "sapiensis".... one must wonder why, sometimes, looking around the world.

In a previous interglacial we had crocodiles and hippopotami in what is now Trafalgar Square. They found the bones while digging the foundations.

The Ice Age ends when the poles become ice free.

We have got used to sea levels being where they are but there is no right or wrong level, it's a lucky dip.

Gee, all those thousands of scientists who did their PhDs in climate science and related fields and then spent decades scientifically examining the problem were wrong. And some guy in his armchair Googling around for a few minutes knows more about it than they do. Who'd a thunk it? Those silly scientists.

There never was any kind of scientific consensus, or even widespread belief, that an ice age was coming. It was some conjecture by a very few scientists for a short period of time, which was blown out of proportion in the media. The majority scientific view was concern over global warming.

From Wikipedia **LINK**

Global cooling was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation, due to the cooling effects of aerosols or orbital forcing. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.^[1]

Edited By Hopper on 11/08/2022 11:19:27

Perhaps the armchair scientists should Google Dunning Kruger effect.

Governments worldwide banned CFC flurocarbons in refrigerants and propellants and as a result the ozone hole has gotten smaller and is most likely to disappear all together fairly soon.

The problem caused by the hole in the ozone layer was not global warming but a wide slew of problems caused by the excessive UV radiation the growing hole was allowing through to the earths surface. This caused much higher rates of skin cancer, cataracts, reduced plant and crop growths, animal growth, marine ecosystem damage etc etc that would have made the planet uninhabitable by 2050.

So it was a great example of how rapid government action averted a worldwide environmental disaster.

More info here **LINK**

Aaah the Dunning Kruger Effect Duncan. The argument ending sneer whose use implies an appeal to authority superiority in the user ,often reinforcing the reality of the effect.

Uncharacteristically Hopper seems to fall under the spell of a PhD conferring divine wisdom.

All this talk makes me wonder how we're ever going to colonise Mars.

Even if we manage to create a perfect atmosphere there, someone will have forgotten to take the toilet rolls.

Martin.

Speaking as a biochemist who doesn't need to use google for this, yes if they think that CO2 will "destroy" the planet they are wrong. the planet has changed since its initial creation, as has the life. Life on the planet will change, which might mean the end of human life, but life will continue to evolve and survive as it always has done. The planet will continue to exist..

The points about ice-ages ought make us consider that the world is relatively cool at present. Although we are in (probably) a warm interglacial, just be glad none of us will ever see the results of the end of the Ice-Age completely.

The arguments really revolve around human activity disturbing a natural event that, albeit with small perturbations lasting no more than a few centuries at a time, would otherwise be a long-term, fairly stable conditions in human-historical terms.

In other words, the Earth would be expected to warm further - the previous interglacial brought sea-level some 10 metres or more above present - but much more slowly. Wildlife was able to adjust to this, and so were our ancestors when their drift Northwards was blocked by Arctic conditions. The South of England was not glaciated, but was Arctic tundra.

Our far-descendants faced with whatever happens, will find it far harder to adjust to a changing climate, especially if changing at an artificially-rapid rate, than our Palaeolithic ancestors and their Neanderthal cousins would have done. (Though we don't exactly know just what did happen to bring about the entire demise of the latter species, beyond hypothesised absorption into our own by breeding.)

.

Mars?

Regarding colonising Mars, I still think that of science-fiction and Musk bank-balance realms - delete the less-credible. The planet cannot support life, especially our own. Who on Earth would want to live on Mars?

It is a cold desert under a very thin atmosphere of mainly carbon-dioxide; and even if colonised in something like Antarctic-research scale and purposes the attempts would be faced with gigantic problems starting with the sheer travelling-time and isolation of the trip each way.

Let alone of support there and for the return trip

Even assuming it would be possible to return from a planet of similar mass to Earth, so a trip there is not just a one-way ride to Eternity with a stop at Mars Services........

If a Roman galley came up the Forth today he would still be able to park it in the Roman boat pens at Cramond at high tide,

2000 years late maybe, but no significant change from back in the day

Of course they're wrong if one wishes to be pedantic - the planet is a lump of matter that's likely to be here for at least several hundred million years.

Not the point though. I don't care about the planet, it's the people who live on it who matter. I suggest there's no practical difference between destroying the planet and destroying the environment. Humans may be incapable of destroying the planet but changing the environment needed to support life as we know it is making rapid progress.

Dave

Yes, Mars.

Don't you remember all the experts explaining it in the news? I'm sure they were the same people that are now informing us about CO2 & climate change.

Martin.

You seem to forget how insignificant humans are to the planet. Nature will do what nature will do. Humans are merely another one of its experiments, regardless of how precious we think we are.

Martin.

If we can get off-planet then we become speshul

Until then it's beam-me-up-scotty

But in the mean time, us insignificant humans on our one habitable planet are still working quite hard at making it uninhabitable for many of the lifeforms that currently make it their home.