Optimum climate for the earth

[snowman]

Question for anyone who thinks global warming is a problem.

1. What God has set the current global climate as the optimum global climate??

2. If the current global climate is not optimum, what one is??

Cannot answer one or two? Then find the answer before you tell me to change things.

Whatever the optimum climate is, if we have enouth understading on whats going on, then we should be able to modify the climate using chemicals injected into the atmosphere. Don't feel comfortable with this idea, then you are not qualified to modify the climate in any other way either. There are proposals that could reverse global warming, if it is indeed happening. Much less expensive than modifying our lifestyle. Why not use them?

THe answer is that global warming is a total hoax. The ONLY purpose is to give a reason to make a lot of people submit to the political will of a few. NFW will this ever happen. If global warming is real we will deal with it with science, not social science.

[jyl]

A climate is optimal if you are evolved and adapted for it.

If climate changes faster than you can evolve or adapt, that is not optimal.

Animals, plants, and human societies have evolved and adapted to the current climate, which has been stable for a long period.

Now the climate is changing, rather rapidly.

Animals and plants evolve slowly. Human societies can adapt quickly but it requires resources.

So for animals and plants that cannot move to follow the climate they are evolved for, and humans societies (i.e. countries) that do not have enough money to fund adaption, this climate change will not be optimal.

For mobile animals and plants, and rich countries, this climate change may not be very different from optimal.

As for modifying the climate, I think it might eventually be possible to block a small fraction of the sunlight hitting the earth, thereby lowering the earth's temperature. We don't know what unexpected effects this could cause. Nor would that address the other problems caused by pollution. But we should be researching these options vigorously.

The ideas range from placing arrays of sunshades in space, to a fleet of ships spraying ocean water into the air to generate water vapor. I haven't read about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere - if this is more than something you made up, please provide a link.

Here is an article from the Economist on "geo-engineering".

"Environment: “Geo-engineering” is the direct use of technology to counteract climate change. The idea is highly controversial

IF MAN is inadvertently capable of heating the entire planet, surely it is not beyond his wit to cool it down as well? Although most climate scientists do not like to talk about it, cutting greenhouse-gas emissions is not, strictly speaking, the only way to solve the problem of climate change. Just as technology caused the problem, it might also be able to help reverse it. The use of planetary-scale engineering to counteract climate change is known as “geo-engineering”.

The idea has been around for years. When a report on climate change was submitted to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, the authors did not even bother to consider the idea of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Instead, the report suggested spreading “very small reflecting particles” across the ocean surface to reflect light and heat back into space.


Since then most campaigners and policymakers have focused on cutting emissions, but the idea of deliberately cooling the Earth has never gone away. Most people think cutting emissions is the more sensible path. But global emissions are still rising, and seem likely to do so for years to come, so some scientists believe it might be worth thinking about a second line of defence, if only as an insurance policy.

The idea has gained new currency in recent months. Climate Change, a scientific journal, published a series of papers on geo-engineering last August, including one by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist. In November the Carnegie Institution and America's space agency, NASA, held a conference on the topic. And American officials have lobbied for geo-engineering research to be included among the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report on climate-change mitigation.

Of all the schemes proposed, the most ambitious (and expensive) idea would be to place a giant sunshade in space at the inner Lagrange point, the position on the line between the Earth and the sun where the combination of centripetal and gravitational forces allows an object to maintain a constant position between the two. If the object is big enough, it could block out enough of the sun's rays to cool the Earth. Roger Angel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, has suggested assembling a cloud of millions of small, reflecting spacecraft less than a metre across at this point, where together they would block out 1.8% of the sun's rays.

Dr Angel estimates that the total mass of the sunshade required would be around 20m tonnes. The shade would consist of individual craft around one metre across, put into position using a combination of magnetic launchers and ion propulsion. He believes the total cost of the project would be a few trillion dollars, or less than 0.5% of world GDP. Dr Angel admits that this is a somewhat far-fetched solution, and does not believe it would be attempted unless all other options had failed. But he has been given a small grant by NASA to explore the idea.

A less exotic approach, endorsed by Dr Crutzen, would be to spread tiny particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays. This effect has already been shown to work in nature: fine sulphate particles, called aerosols, ejected by large volcanic eruptions like that of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, have produced periods of global cooling. And sulphate pollution from industry had similar consequences, helping to balance the warming effects of carbon dioxide until the 1990s, when pollution controls in many regions had the perverse effect of increasing warming.

Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution, suggests that this idea might be more suited to local rather than global application, at least at first. The Arctic, for example, is among the regions most affected by global warming, and keeping the polar sea-ice frozen would be a good thing: white ice reflects more heat back into space than dark ocean, and the scheme would also save a few polar bears from drowning.

The most down-to-earth idea is that proposed by John Latham, a scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. He suggests that blasting tiny droplets of seawater into the air would stimulate the formation of highly reflective, low-lying marine cloud. Simulations suggest this would have a substantial cooling effect. The question is how to do it economically. Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh has designed an unmanned vessel which would produce these clouds using wind power. Just 50 vessels, he reckons, each costing a few million dollars and spraying around 10kg (22lb) of water per second, could cancel out a year's worth of global carbon-dioxide emissions—though another 50 vessels would be needed every year until carbon-dioxide emissions were under control.

Dr Salter's ships would be much more precise than other geo-engineering schemes—“like an artist's paintbrush”, as he puts it. They could be deployed to the North Atlantic to cool the Greenland ice sheet during the northern summer and then migrate to Antarctica for the southern summer. Dr Caldeira even suggests that by cooling the sea, these ships could be used to combat hurricanes, since high sea-surface temperatures are linked to hurricane formation.

Other proposals include seeding the oceans to get them to absorb more carbon dioxide and building huge reflectors in desert regions to reflect sunlight back into space. This latter idea is impractical, says Dr Caldeira, who reckons that half the world's deserts would have to be covered. Indeed, most geo-engineering schemes sound half-crazy and tend to have both technical and aesthetic complications. Deliberately polluting the stratosphere would make the sky less blue, although sunsets would probably be prettier. Blocking out the sun would help to cool the planet, but it would do little to address other nasty side-effects of high carbon-dioxide levels, such as the acidification of the oceans.

Many greens oppose the whole idea in principle. Ralph Cicerone, president of America's National Academy of Sciences, has said that geo-engineering inspires opposition for “various and sincere reasons that are not wholly scientific”. But it does seem reasonable to worry that the illusory hope of a scientific fix might undermine the adoption of policy solutions, such as carbon caps and carbon quotas, designed to address the underlying cause of the problem. And then there is the danger of unintended consequences. Climate change is arguably an experiment which mankind has unwittingly found itself performing on the planet. To start a second experiment in the hopes of counteracting the first would be risky, to put it mildly."

[Tobra]

It is not so much the climate as the population, if you ask me.

Catastrophic climate change, they say it killed the dinosaurs. If you can't move to a more palatable climate when it changes faster than you can adapt you are done, true dat.

[Moneyguy1]

"I can't hear you!! Na na na na na!"

[widebody911]

Originally posted by snowman
1. What God has set the current global climate as the optimum global climate??[/B]

So is this the new Republican global warming counter-argument? Nice.

[cairns]

1. I think it was a question not an argument.
2. What do Republicans have to do with it? (this is a question too).

[p911dad]

I spent the last 2 months on a sabbatical, and had the time to read 10 or 12 books in my leisure hours. One was "The State of Fear" by Michael Crickton, a novel written about the claims of the global warming movement with footnotes from actual scientific sources. It is written as a good adventure tale that during the telling discloses the environmental movement as a large, hungry bureaucracy like any other, that needs constant feeding and promotion. The really interesting device the author uses is the graphs of actual weather data from stations around the globe that show over the span of recorded weather history there is really no warming or sea level changes at all, just the global warming folks taking short periods of normal variations that illustrate their point of view that something much more ominous is unfolding. My point in recounting this is to reveal how little most of us actually know about the science in this global warming argument. We all see the hype of the gw lobby on the evening news every night, it makes good copy for the media, it lets them feed the state of fear that we needed to replace the Soviet Union as the big bogeyman under our beds. I would like to see more scientific proof and less of fat ol' Al Gore acting like Yoda.

[island911]

Originally posted by widebody911
So is this the new Republican global warming counter-argument? Nice.

Geeze Thom, you're just one of those against wetlands, aren't ya? All that tundra now wetlands.

Is it the threat of extra bird crap on the car that pisses ya off? Ya know, the white stuff contributes to global cooling.

[Flatbutt1]

I for one think that there is indeed a climate change occurring. I am NOT convinced that human activity is responsible for it. BUT if we take action to reduce pollution and it turns out that the warming continues,,,is a cleaner warmer environment such a bad thing?

[legion]

Originally posted by Tobra
Catastrophic climate change, they say it killed the dinosaurs. If you can't move to a more palatable climate when it changes faster than you can adapt you are done, true dat.

You mean it's happened in the past--and it wasn't caused by people? You're kidding me.

[M.D. Holloway]

depends on if you are selling blankets or ceiling fans...

[Bob Goding]

Further proof!

[jyl]

Originally posted by gmeteer
I spent the last 2 months on a sabbatical, and had the time to read 10 or 12 books in my leisure hours. One was "The State of Fear" by Michael Crickton, a novel written about the claims of the global warming movement with footnotes from actual scientific sources.

I think Michael Cricton spins a good yarn, but if I were trying to learn up on global warming or the lack thereof, and I was only going to read one book to educate myself, I don't think it would be a science ficton novel.

[island911]

Yes,. ..why read science fiction when you can read "science consensus" born out of manipulated statistical data . . .all driven for the need of a political hot-topic which can only be understood and solved by a politician. ...Whereas "science fiction" is just far too askew of true science.

[RoninLB]

Sci Channel said an ice age within 20yrs is a constant possibility due to the always changing Atlantic Ocean currents. England and Euro wouldn't be able to grow crops.

[Tervuren]

Looking at the incredibly wide spread of creatures that need wouldn't survive extreme that you find buried all over the world - I'd warrant that the ideal climate is slightly cooler than our hottest regions, and warmer than our coldest. The ideal climate would have little weather differences, as there would be less temperature clashes across the globe.

In my opinion, something "sheilded" the Earth, keeping it much more uniform - when this was broken, we get very localized changing conditions all over the world.

[Moneyguy1]

Fellas:

"Global Warming" would not be uniform over the globe. Some areas would get warmer and drier, some would get colder. If the Gulf Stream shuts down due to decreased salinity, it could put Great Britain and Northern Europe into a very cold world of hurt. Remember how far north those countries actually are....far more north than anyplace in the US except Alaska.

As far a "optimum climate", it all depends on the organism. Out here we have some reasonably high mountains. Every elevation has its own climate and things living in specific zones cannot exist at other levels. A Cactus does not do well at 10,000 feet, nor does a pine tree feel comfortable in an arid area. The concept of an overall optimum climate is meaningless.

[nut11]

Of concern to me is the rapidly melting glaciers and snow pack at both poles, particularly the north including Greenland. Anomaly?

87 Blk Coupe

[snowman]

The basic POINT is that we do NOT UNDERSTAND, nor does any scientist understand the global climate. We cannot predict the consequences of a warmer or cooler climate, except on a local basis, and even those predictions are suspect.

The world and all of its inhabitants are dynamic. They adapt to change. Some do better than others.

One golden rule is to do no harm. Hard to abide by if you don't know what you are doing to begin with.

One argument against evolution is devolution. IE there are no NEW species being developed as one would expect with evolution. What was the climate that caused the production of all known species. That climate certainly must be optimum as our current climate is only causing species to decline in number. One thing for certain, it probably wasn't a cooler climate. Heat produces more activity, cold produces less. A fact that is true for all known natural processes.

[Moneyguy1]

Doing no harm is not the same as doing nothing.

Yes, the climate is a complex "organism", made up of a myriad of microclimates. The environment under a shade tree is far different rhan the environment 50 yards away in full sun. What does well in one area will not do so well in the other. On a larger scale, if an area of the country such as the Southwest continues to suffer from decreased rainfall, then it might be time to rethink the expansion that has been occuring there, and plan for the future needs of the area. Better harvesting of water, storage rather than letting monsoon rains make their way to the Gulf of California, etc. Action can be taken to alleviate change, but in most cases, these actions will be local in nature.

BTW....can one prove there are no new species being evolved? How does on explain the continuing ability of microorganisms to adapt and morph into new strains? Nothing is static in the world, only some things are subtle and in higher organisms, many centuries may be required for a truly new species to come along. We, as humans, think in too brief a time scale.