Originally posted by: Davan
Im sorry, but your attempts at oversimplification do nothing to address the reality of the world that we live in. First of all, your "simple ecologically and environmentally sound ideas" will cost billions of dollars per metric ton of CO2 emission. The end result will probably be around 0.0000000000078 °C Degrees celcius change by eliminating all CO2 emissions in the US, and cost around $127,617,700,943,835.84 per °C. Even if these numbers are off (since they were provided by a clearly biased conservative nazi child molester mass murder,) if it costs even 1/10 of this claim its still such a significant amount of money that if you really cant think of a better use for it then Im sorry you cannot see any logical conclusion to this.
To follow your other line of reasoning, that we have everything to lose, I also take issue with this claim. The most ridiculous, overstated and generous climatology models show the temperature change to be about 6-7 degrees celcius worldwide by 2100. This equals out to about .6 - .7 degrees per 10 year period, in other words a temperature change equivalent in a 10 year period greater than the last 120 years put together. Like I said, we are already 6 years into the first 10 year period and .. well.. Haha.. funnily enough the temperature has decreased since 1998 -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main...l&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html
We have a lot of catching up to do for this to prove out. *edit in* If you take the more realistic approach that the temperature increase will be between .8-1.5 degrees C over the next 100 years, its hard to say that we are losing "a lot". This more likely temperature change would probably cause the same level of hysteria of that of the past 100 years, and still amount to zero evidential change on a global level. Youre going to have to do a lot of convincing to prove to me that a 1 degree Celcius change will have a huge global impact that causes us to lose everything. Ignoring the fact that almost everyone here will be dead by then and none of us will be able to prove out even this minimal theory.
The funny thing, for me, is how all of the "sky is falling" people are going to hedge 20-30 years from now. I wish there were a way to preserve this thread until then.
Davan,
Some flaws in your argument above:
A) Billions of dollars per metric ton?!!!
The use on nuclear power in the United States (and we don't rely on it for a whole lot) reduced the amount of CO2 that would have otherwise been released over a 10 year span from 1995 to 2005 by 7.3 BILLION tons, or on average 730 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Logically, if we doubled the number of nuclear plants, we would reduce CO2 emissions by 730 million tons per year...
According to your "estimate", (I'll use 2 billion for your "billions"), that's at a cost of... crud, sci not time... 7.3E6 *2E9 = 1.46E16..
14,600,000,000,000,000 What is that, 14.6 quadrillion dollars?
So, were you joking with the "billions" or simply have that poor of a conceptual understanding of numbers... I can't quite tell.
Furthermore, you are obviously assuming a linear model for the change in temperature. Why do you believe that the temperature would go up that way - a certain number of degrees per decade... Perhaps it would follow a quadratic model or some other model where each decade, the temp goes up more than during the previous decade due to feedback mechanisms.
Oh, and about that increase in snowfall in antarctica... It used to be too cold for there to be enough moisture in the air to cause significant snowfall. Your profile says you're from Georgia, so maybe you don't understand this. I'm from western NY. It simply does not snow, or barely snows when the temperature is 10 below zero, except in rare cases where two very different airmasses are colliding - one very cold, the other laden with moisture (and warmer) So, as the temperature is dropping quickly at a weather front, you might see a lot of snow, but once the temperature is down below zero, you can forget about much new snow forming (lots of it blows around when it's windy though).
So again, your fact (and we don't dispute it) that more snow is accumulating on antarctica is evidence FOR global warming, not against global warming.
Since you seem to like links, you can find hundreds if you'll google yourself. But I quickly searched for "Antarctica" and "Desert":
From PBS:
Sometimes people call Antarctica a frozen desert. It hasn't rained or snowed in some places here for over 100 years. Only 4% of Antarctica thaws out in the spring -- the rest stays permanently covered in ice
here
In fact, a google search using antarctica desert gives these sites on the first 10 hits:
madsci.org
pbs.org
nationalgeographic.com
coolantarctica.com
pbase.com
geophys.washington.edu
house.gov
enchangedlearning.com
resa.net
Antarctica is a desert. (WAS a desert until it started warming up enough so it could snow more often there.)
MORE SNOW ON ANTARCTICA MEANS IT'S WARMER THERE!!! (just not above 32F)