Hydrogen engines, rather than electric?

I think a lot of people say it is complicated simply because they don't want to change, I mean it is probably enough to be able to read a few graphs which most people can understand?

The hardest thing for people to accept is probably that they cannot continue living as they are doing now. If there are a few scientists who try to support another opinion it can be easy to see them as a way of escape.

Well @Redglyph isn't wrong.

Still Global warming is a natural part of Earths history. The problem is humans have speed up the process, and that is the problem. We helped accelerate a natural process.

Just remember things have to get worse before they get better. It's a cycle.

GothicGothicness said:

I think a lot of people say it is complicated simply because they don't want to change, I mean it is probably enough to be able to read a few graphs which most people can understand?

The hardest thing for people to accept is probably that they cannot continue living as they are doing now. If there are a few scientists who try to support another opinion it can be easy to see them as a way of escape.

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I don't say that because I don't want to change, since my conclusion is just opposite. As for others who give a public opinion, it can go both ways, people who invested in fossil-based energy or in renewable energy, and so on. It's not only the lack of will to change, though it's certainly an important factor.

But... we had measures of carbon dioxide in the XIXth century, really?

There were a few books on the subject that I almost bought, but they're not at the top of my backlog. It could be interesting to dive into that further, maybe in the near future. But I need to understand how something works in order to be convinced, just looking at graphs won't do. There are many of them out there, leading to opposite conclusions.

Redglyph said:

I don't say that because I don't want to change, since my conclusion is just opposite. As for others who give a public opinion, it can go both ways, people who invested in fossil-based energy or in renewable energy, and so on. It's not only the lack of will to change, though it's certainly an important factor.

But… we had measures of carbon dioxide in the XIXth century, really?

There were a few books on the subject that I almost bought, but they're not at the top of my backlog. It could be interesting to dive into that further, maybe in the near future. But I need to understand how something works in order to be convinced, just looking at graphs won't do. There are many of them out there, leading to opposite conclusions.

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But… we had measures of carbon dioxide in the XIXth century, really?

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Those are based on rough estimates of the things we do know from that time, but human carbon dioxide emission at those times would be almost neglect-able compared to today.

I can understand that looking at graphs are not enough for you, and that you need to understand how something works to be totally convinced. But those graphs are just based on measurements, those measurements are so clear that it is very hard to ignore for most people. However reading a few books about the climate change, and reading research papers and so on is probably beyond a lot of people, for them looking at those graphs can be enough. I have not seen any measurements going against those particular kind of graphs, but I would be very interested in seeing some if you have them.

Besides if you feel the need to educate yourself further, shouldn't those books be in the top of your backlog given the crisis we are already in?

If humans are the primary driver, someone's going to have to explain how we had an ice age (significant global cooling) that ended (just as much warming back up) while humans were still dicking around in caves. I NEVER get a response to the question from the climate alarmists, which tells me they don't have an answer.

This doesn't mean we can't be smart about trying to minimize our influence on the system, but it's 100% certain that there are a lot more factors in the equation than driving cars and AOC's cow farts.

When Gaia has had her fill of us, she'll shuffle us off and reset her systems. The planet will endure, it has for eons, other species have come and gone and terra has withstood it all. To think we're any different is almost the definition of hubris.

I'd like to think we've evolved to the point of being able to live in harmony with the world, yet that is simply wish-full thinking on my part. The truth is, it's always been easier to destroy than create, to damage rather than build, and we as humans excel at one, and are quite poor at the other.

dteowner said:

If humans are the primary driver, someone's going to have to explain how we had an ice age (significant global cooling) that ended (just as much warming back up) while humans were still dicking around in caves. I NEVER get a response to the question from the climate alarmists, which tells me they don't have an answer.

This doesn't mean we can't be smart about trying to minimize our influence on the system, but it's 100% certain that there are a lot more factors in the equation than driving cars and AOC's cow farts.

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Strange that you have not been given any response to that. you might not have been talking to the right people, ice ages and change in temperature are natural for the earth. They happen over long periods of time and the ecology of the earth gets a chance to adopt to them.

What is different now, as you can see in the graphs, is how fast it is happening, instead of taking hundreds or thousands of years, it is happening in tens of years much faster than ever before, and too fast for the ecology of the earth to handle.

Human nature and like a certain game said "What can change the nature of a man?". In my experience on this dust-ball nothing it seems can. Just my opinion though I'm a cynic.

Just remember from the game.

If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the Planes, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear - whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can.

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dteowner said:

If humans are the primary driver, someone's going to have to explain how we had an ice age (significant global cooling) that ended (just as much warming back up) while humans were still dicking around in caves. I NEVER get a response to the question from the climate alarmists, which tells me they don't have an answer.

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Well, I'm surprised no-one's attempted to answer your question. The first bit, on which there is no doubt, is that the Earth's climate, and the composition of the atmosphere, have changed drastically over millions of years, quite naturally. I don't think any sensible person disputes that. The key thing is that these changes have historically taken 10s or 100s of thousands of years, and the biosphere has evolved around them. We can draw conclusions about the makeup of the atmosphere in the past by examining ice cores and geological samples.

With regard to what caused the ice ages, I think the best fit theory is the Milankovitch cycles; the changes in the Earth's orbit and attitude around the Sun, that change the amount of solar energy hitting the surface.

The key thing about what's happening now is that though the temperature change we've had is relatively small compared to periods in the distant past, the rate of change is far beyond the historical record. And, the main smoking gun (that I can only say has convinced the vast majority of the world's credible scientific organisations), is that this unprecedented rise in global temperature correlates extremely well with the rate at which humanity has been pumping out greenhouse gasses, which are now at levels the planet hasn't seen for millions of years - and we've managed to do in only about a hundred years.

No-one's saying that nature doesn't also play a part - a super-volcanic explosion tomorrow could plunge us into the devastating equivalent of a nuclear winter, but I don't think that should have any bearing on what we do about the things under our control.

dteowner said:

This doesn't mean we can't be smart about trying to minimize our influence on the system, but it's 100% certain that there are a lot more factors in the equation than driving cars and AOC's cow farts.

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Yes, I think it is probably certain that there are other factors involved, and I don't think there's any scientists saying otherwise. The position of most scientific institutions varies between believing that human activity is significant, to dominant. Here's a few examples:

Perhaps I should clarify a bit. I've seen/read a handful of explanations for the ice ages which were all well-studied and peer-reviewed and all that good stuff. So we've got numerous inputs to the system happening quite literally at the cosmic scale and even the folks that "named" some of those inputs (such as the Milankovitch cycle) have no real feel for how much of the "pie" any of those directly contribute to the thermometer. But the alarmists will state with unabashed certainty that man is the biggest slice? I call hubris at best and outright bullshit at the other end of the spectrum.

It's probably safe to say that man has increased the slope of the curve by some amount, but it's a wild leap to assume that our coefficient in the equation is larger than 0.5. Heck, before Malinkovitch et al, explaining an ice age was down to witchcraft and "beats the hell outta me". Who's to say there's not another "cosmic" variable in the equation we don't even know yet, perhaps one that would even be a player in the curve's slope.

We can't even reliably predict if it's going to rain in the next 4 hours but we've got this global climate thing all hammered out? I guess that makes me a skeptic, which often gets painted by the alarmists as a denier because it's far easier to demonize/minimize than to question one's own extremism.

Redglyph said:

I was initially convinced that human activities were playing a major role. But I've heard arguments by scientists on both camps, and I've seen political games in which people believing humans were the cause avoided a debate with people believing humans' influence was negligible. Actually, they had enough power to stop them from talking, banning them from universities. If the evidence was so strong, they wouldn't have to act like that.

I have little doubt that there are political influences from both sides, decisions on those issues have huge impacts.

The climate is a very complex system, I don't believe we currently have any model that allows us to decide either way. I'm still of the opinion we have a significant impact, but it's more a personal belief than certainty based on any proof. Even though as an engineer I had lessons in thermodynamics and basic meteorology, I would be unable to verify most of the claims. It's a very interesting science, however


That's basically my conclusion. Either way, it makes sense to make an effort in that direction, if for nothing else, at least from the resource and pollution points of view.

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On the bolded part. No that's now how it works. You don't allow random people giving talks on flat earth ideas in universities. It's not to do with the amount of evidence available, but about giving debunked ideas a platform to spread misinformation.

dteowner said:

Perhaps I should clarify a bit. I've seen/read a handful of explanations for the ice ages which were all well-studied and peer-reviewed and all that good stuff. So we've got numerous inputs to the system happening quite literally at the cosmic scale and even the folks that "named" some of those inputs (such as the Milankovitch cycle) have no real feel for how much of the "pie" any of those directly contribute to the thermometer. But the alarmists will state with unabashed certainty that man is the biggest slice? I call hubris at best and outright bullshit at the other end of the spectrum.

It's probably safe to say that man has increased the slope of the curve by some amount, but it's a wild leap to assume that our coefficient in the equation is larger than 0.5. Heck, before Malinkovitch et al, explaining an ice age was down to witchcraft and "beats the hell outta me". Who's to say there's not another "cosmic" variable in the equation we don't even know yet, perhaps one that would even be a player in the curve's slope.

We can't even reliably predict if it's going to rain in the next 4 hours but we've got this global climate thing all hammered out? I guess that makes me a skeptic, which often gets painted by the alarmists as a denier because it's far easier to demonize/minimize than to question one's own extremism.

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I don't think that's the issue for me.
As you say, humans have likely contributed a certain amount, which does nothing but rise. The pollution element of its own should be enough to give people pause. Kids living in bad areas have a much higher percentage chance of getting ashtma or other lung diseases for example.

So why would people not want to stop these things. Coal plants and other fossil fuels are some of the largest polluters on the planet.

Even if climate change were a total hoax, would you not want to improve the lives of your children through renewable energy and the like to reduce diseases ?

I think saying climate change is all doom and gloom misses the point that most measures to stop it are the exact measures that also help so many other things such as health.

Well, I think the first thing to say is that if someone is talking in "unabashed certainties", you're not dealing with a scientist. Science inherently does not deal in certainties - only in a body of evidence by which rational people make decisions. If you look at those quotes I posted, none of the language is remotely in the vicinity of unabashed certainty.

And I think you should look at what you're saying in the context of other scientific investigations. Let's say an airliner crashes in the ocean, and we discover that it had been not been filled with enough fuel, and went down at the exact point it would have expended that fuel. We're probably going to draw the most rational conclusion from that. We could be mistaken. We don't know with certainty how big a slice of the pie of possible causes the fuel shortage actually represented, and might never know. We don't know what other cosmic variables might have been involved.

With regard to climate and human activity, I would say there is enough evidence for rational people to say we need to take action. We've increased atmospheric greenhouse gasses to a point not seen for millions of years in the space of a hundred years, and in that period the temperature has spiked at a rate never seen before on the record, and the effects of climate change are being felt everywhere. In the entire record, to the best of our understanding, this does not fit with the pace of change we have seen from natural causes of variations. Even without other lines of evidence, I'm willing to bet on doing something about that, rather than hoping for the best.

Ripper said:

With regard to climate and human activity, I would say there is enough evidence for rational people to say we need to take action. We've increased atmospheric greenhouse gasses to a point not seen for millions of years in the space of a hundred years, and in that period the temperature has spiked at a rate never seen before on the record, and the effects of climate change are being felt everywhere. In the entire record, to the best of our understanding, this does not fit with the pace of change we have seen from natural causes of variations. Even without other lines of evidence, I'm willing to bet on doing something about that, rather than hoping for the best.

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Ah, but again you've got underlying assumptions where variables are being treated as constants. Go back a mere 100 years and the global population was 2B, versus 7.7B now. Significant portions of the globe were undisturbed plant life, which in addition to processing CO2 also improve the solar energy absorption of the planet as a whole. So, say I give you a Harry Potter wand and all fossil fuel use (to pick the favorite demon) immediately goes to zero. You've still got over 3x the worthless bastards pumping out CO2 that you had a mere century ago. Those 3x bastards still need a place to live that didn't exist previously, meaning deforestation and such will march on unabated. Those 3x bastards insist on eating... Suddenly, your coup de grace over fossil fuels seems a bit like roundoff error. And that completely ignores the economic armageddon we glossed over- I guess Harry did a few extra spells behind the scenes when nobody was looking.

So, is the benefit worth the pain? Color me unconvinced. Unless you've got a solid way to stop population growth you're pissing in the wind and cheering wildly if a single drop misses your shoes.

dteowner said:

Ah, but again you've got underlying assumptions where variables are being treated as constants. Go back a mere 100 years and the global population was 2B, versus 7.7B now. Significant portions of the globe were undisturbed plant life, which in addition to processing CO2 also improve the solar energy absorption of the planet as a whole. So, say I give you a Harry Potter wand and all fossil fuel use (to pick the favorite demon) immediately goes to zero. You've still got over 3x the worthless bastards pumping out CO2 that you had a mere century ago. Those 3x bastards still need a place to live that didn't exist previously, meaning deforestation and such will march on unabated. Those 3x bastards insist on eating… Suddenly, your coup de grace over fossil fuels seems a bit like roundoff error. And that completely ignores the economic armageddon we glossed over- I guess Harry did a few extra spells behind the scenes when nobody was looking.

So, is the benefit worth the pain? Color me unconvinced. Unless you've got a solid way to stop population growth you're pissing in the wind and cheering wildly if a single drop misses your shoes.

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You are right on that front, but again, does it mean people shouldn't do anything ? No...

People who are really serious also advocate against eating animals because that's a massive drain on resources in addition to stopping the needless consumerism that wasn't needed before. Why do people need two cars in a city with wide availability and good quality public transport ?

On the population front, the most likely hypothesis at the moment is that population growth will slow down before it even reaches 10bn.

China's population growth is below 1% per year now and some countries are even reversing their growth such as Russia and Japan.
The population growth rate has almost halved since the 70s from 2% to 1% globally.

https://datacommons.org/place/Earth?utm_medium=explore&mprop=count&popt=Person&hl=en

dteowner said:

Ah, but again you've got underlying assumptions where variables are being treated as constants. Go back a mere 100 years and the global population was 2B, versus 7.7B now. Significant portions of the globe were undisturbed plant life, which in addition to processing CO2 also improve the solar energy absorption of the planet as a whole. So, say I give you a Harry Potter wand and all fossil fuel use (to pick the favorite demon) immediately goes to zero. You've still got over 3x the worthless bastards pumping out CO2 that you had a mere century ago. Those 3x bastards still need a place to live that didn't exist previously, meaning deforestation and such will march on unabated. Those 3x bastards insist on eating… Suddenly, your coup de grace over fossil fuels seems a bit like roundoff error.

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Except that all those factors are taken into consideration, and that's why the language of the scientific bodies I quoted talk about human activity, not only fossil fuel usage. But in the first place, nobody thinks the fossil fuel component is remotely a "rounding error" - that's just not credible. We know how much greenhouse gas has gone up, and we have a good idea of how much various outputs contributed to it. That really isn't a viable claim.

But secondly, there is no doubt whatsoever that problem number one is the sheer size of human civilisation now, including its other contributory environmental impacts. That's why I was joking about eating people and airline pilots. There's no doubt that if we reduced the human population to, say, half a billion, and kept it there, we could carry on slashing and burning, and probably not trouble the biosphere too much. But, I'm dispositionally disinclined to Thanos-based solutions.

EDIT: When you talk about the bastards pumping out CO2, do you mean just human beings naturally respirating CO2, even without fossil fuels?

Apparently we are entering into a phase where the Moon wobbles for a decade. This is expected to cause global floods which I am sure will be used as political fodder. At the end of the day you should ask yourselves who gains politically and economically from the man-made climate change alarmism. It will always be the middle class being asked to pay for the cost of what is largely a corporate and government driven affair; no matter which side of the debate you are on. These entities love passing the buck so they can get all the money. Meanwhile the middle class shrinks to irrelevance.

Ripper said:

EDIT: When you talk about the bastards pumping out CO2, do you mean just human beings naturally respirating CO2, even without fossil fuels?

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That's exactly what I'm talking about in that hypothetical. You've tripled a measurable source of CO2 but ascribed the damage primarily to fossil fuels. Bad math, that is, which was exactly my point. When the alarmists get good and wound up, the bad math flows copiously.

dteowner said:

That's exactly what I'm talking about in that hypothetical. You've tripled a measurable source of CO2 but ascribed the damage primarily to fossil fuels. Bad math, that is, which was exactly my point. When the alarmists get good and wound up, the bad math flows copiously.

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Nope. Human respiration does not contribute to an overall rise in global CO2, no matter how many there are. The carbon cycle of living things is a closed loop - the food we consume all ultimately comes from plants - they inhale the CO2 from the atmosphere, we exhale that CO2 back out. Then we grow more plants to produce more food. There is no net change. In fact, if we didn't release other carbon, when we die we lock a small amount of CO2 back in the soil, acting as a small net reducer. Humans beings themselves are not a global CO2 source.

When the clueless get desperate, the bullshit flows copiously.

Just reading this thread its easy to see why our race is doomed. I mainly feel bad for all the animals we are taking with us, even though I am sure the planet will outlive us in the end.