Interesting Discussions on Climate Change

I regularly read a financial blog by Garth Turner.
Its daily comments often stray from what Mr. T has posted that day; however, it remains of considerable interest to me.
Sometimes it's just an example of how diverse--and uneducated, or intellectually astute--our thoughts can be.

A sampling of recent comments from his blog that I found particularly compelling:

#108 Flat Earth Society on 06.18.18 at 8:50 pm

One of the former founders of Green Peace, Patrick Moore (PhD), thinks CO2 levels are too low, and 1000 ppm (parts per million, so 0.1%) would be ideal for life. How did it get too low? Well, plants have been sequestering it in the ground since life began. CO2 levels in the distant past were much higher than they are today, but plants (or algae) have been hovering it up for a billion years and then getting buried. So how did CO2 levels get so low as 270 parts er million prior to the industrial revolution? Plants again had to get better and better at hovering what CO2 was left to survive. But if we look out in to the future 100 million years or so, they probably would have used it all up and everything would die. Not that anybody really cares what will happen in 100 million years, there is no way we are going to be around in 100 years, but in a way it could be argued that by returning a bunch of CO2 to the atmosphere we have potentially extended the period of time the earth will have life. Patrick Moore makes that same argument and I stole it from him.

In fact, if you go back far enough there was no oxygen in the atmosphere and lots of CO2, enough to suffocate an air breathing animal, probably on the order of 10% or more, which is something like 250 times more than we have now. Of course that wouldn’t be good at this point because only plants would survive, so there is a number that is too high.

When Patrick Moore co-founded Green Peace the main topics of concern to the organization were nuclear testing and over whaling, both bad things that are irreversible. The nuclear industry as a whole was also a target because the byproducts are nasty and we’ve made enough of them now that when they do finally escape containment, which they will, it will end life on the planet. It won’t be CO2 that finally ends this 500 million year experiment called life, it will be plutonium and the die is already cast. It’s just a matter of time. A few more Fukushimas and we’re done. Splitting the atom was the single most stupid thing mankind has ever done. Sorry “peoplekind”.

But anyway, Patrick Moore and Micheal Mann and everyone else can just chillax, based on how much fossil fuels we’ve burned since the start of the industrial revolution and how much CO2 we’ve added since then we likely won’t be able to push the CO2 levels to much past 600 parts per million before fossil fuel extraction is uneconomic. Estimates vary as to when that will be but it won’t be 100 years. It could be 20 years until the decline process begins. Some say it’s already begun or we wouldn’t be losing $20 on every barrel of shale oil we produce. Sure, there is lots of shale oil, but it takes a lot to get it out.

Once fossil fuels start to decline, so does the economy. Once that decline goes far enough at some point we won’t have the resources to keep all that lovely plutonium and enriched uranium we’ve made in the swimming pools they store it in. After that nature takes over via decay of the structures and eventually all those radioactive materials go atmospheric. At that point it’s gonna be 1 million years before things settle out enough that the earth could sustain life again, but there won’t be enough CO2 in the atmosphere to kick it off again. We don’t know exactly how life started, but what we do know is it took a high CO2 atmosphere and not an oxygen rich atmosphere. Oxygen tends to oxidize the very compounds that needed to form into organic chemicals so what you want is CO2, which provides carbon which is the base of all organic chemicals, not oxygen. Oxygen is a byproduct of life, CO2 is the gas of life. Oxygen breathing life, ie. animals, are a byproduct of plant life, things that can photosynthesize. Things that can photosynthesize (plants) need CO2, or they die.

So once again governments are coming to the rescue by addressing the wrong problem. The 2 most pressing issues we face is that we’re running out of oil and that we’ve piled up all this plutonium, virtually all of it above ground. What happens to the climate is of little concern by comparison.

(PS for the brights: The real reason for the carbon taxes is so you will use less, so that in an era of scarcity they (TPTB) will have more. It’s not anything to do with the climate it’s all going to get burned, every last drop of it. The question is “who gets to burn it? Al Gore’s private jet never goes without fuel.)

(PPS also for the brights: All organic life forms, when introduced to a new source of food (energy), expand exponentially, until they have consumed all of the food (energy) and then the population collapses. For the yeast in a carboy of grape juice it’s the sugar in the grape juice but once that is used up it stops bubbling and the yeast dies. For humans, times were pretty boring until the advent of the steam engine, at which point it became fossil fuels. When they are gone so are we, at least as we know it. The hunter gatherers that might survive after won’t have the means nor the knowledge to contain the plutonium.)

(PPPS also also for the brights: Solar and wind are like trying to run a transportation system on horses and buggies. It won’t scale.)

(PPPPS, also for the brights. I didn’t know what I know now when I had kids. But now you do. There is no point.)

#157 Oft deleted much maligned stock.picker on 06.18.18 at 11:35 pm

Climate wacko’s and leftist nut jobs are in denial..a denial of the truth. Climate has been changing in for billions of years. Earth has been an aqua planet…a lava planet….a desert planet…a planenet with rapidly shifting continents banging into one another….a place where scary reptiles thrived in a tropical paradise. Einstien postulated that the plenet has shifted on it’s axis more than once. But none of that happened after I gassed up my Escalade.

Please….hopefully for the last time….I beg you to read the origin documents that invented industrial output taxation as a means to fund wealth distribution to the third world. The two terms in the origin documents have changed but the game is the same. The Brundtland Commission spells it out….although industry output was called out for global cooling…but when that didn’t fly it was changed to global warming…..but when that didn’t take it was again changed to climate change because of it’s nebulous catch all formulation. Wealth distribution was first called sustainable development….and it’s supposed to make the planet more fair….but nothing about the tax was ever to do with climate…..that came later when third world countries in the UN were told about a sudden flood of riches if they backed it in committee.

None of the climate change leaders believe in the bunk they’re selling. They’ve been outed as frauds as well as every scintilla of false data that’s been misrepresented….like doom and gloom calls for extinct polar bears etc. And guess what..among ..the origin signatories were Pierre Trudeau ( who had his own Gerald Butts…a thug named Maurice Strong) . So if you wonder why Junior is on this look no further than his zany drag queen dad.

Look at the University of East Anglia email dump where in the main players outed themselves as frauds and climate change a con. It’s always been about money. The Pope loves the scam because it increases the ability of Catholic charities to hand out and money on the front steps of his collosal churches. Fraud…fraud…fraud.

Read the origin documents….understand that billions have been spent on propaganda….realize that thousands of proxy orgs grow rich on grants and subsidies…think about the billions that carpet baggers like Al Gore and a new army of windmill hucksters have made from ignorance.

 

#158 IHCTD9 on 06.18.18 at 11:39 pm

I was watching a documentary on super volcanoes a while back. They were talking about Krakatoa when they interviewed this scientist that was a leader on interpreting ice cores. He had cores from bores miles deep, 100’s of thousands of years worth of Climate history preserved in ice. He showed them the core from the late 1800’s which contained the volcanic ash deposited in the arctic snow by Krakatoa, and the global atmospheric and climate effects that followed, and how long they lasted for. This was then tied to written historic record with perfect harmony.

He went on to talk about all the things ice cores can tell us. One I took note of, was the temperature swings in between ice ages – mini ice ages. These last only a couple hundred years, and he can pick them out, and attach them to written incidents in history like failed crops, the Thames freezing up, and other out of the ordinary climate events. He said the climate seems steady and solid to us, but it really not. It swings wildly, and naturally, and has always done this. It’s all there in the ice cores. These are essentially a written record of climate history going back as far as you can drill.

The earth’s orbit changes from round to elliptical every 100 K years or so. The intensity of the sun changes in an 11 year cycle. Volcanic activity, axial tilt changes, oceanic current changes all have caused glacial advance and retreat in the past. Even the recent past.

The forces at work are on a cosmic scale, they are multiple, and are quite (bloody obviously) out of our control. The idea that carbon emissions are the be-all, end-all de facto metric determining climate temperatures is a joke. The idea that taxing folks will have any affect on any climate metric is also a king sized piece of stand up comedy. How much taxes needed to effect earth’s orbit?

We’re all just along for the ride, I’m not even going to get into just how minuscule Ontario’s carbon output is on a global scale. Focusing on Carbon output is the only game that allows the blame to be placed on humans. If we could effect the output of the sun, or the earth’s orbit, there’d be a tax for that too.

#159 Flat Earth Society on 06.18.18 at 11:40 pm

#125 acdel

“Flat Earth???? Seriously????”

acdel, I will forgive you for having missed the comments I made explaining what the Flat Earth Society is and why we formed it. Is the earth flat???? No. Are there people who think it is flat? Yes. Are there people who can be convinced the earth is flat by looking at the distortions that occur when you try and transpose a 3 dimensional surface to 2 dimensions using Google Maps? Yes. Are there people who think the Bible is a science text book? Yes, although surprisingly not most mainstream churches. Or mission was to identify these people and contain them away from mainstream conversations on the internet. The last thing we need is for them to be commenting on matters of real importance, or even the ones discussed on Garth’s website, so we created a whole world on YouTube to occupy them. The are now fully in their own self contain universe. And the best part? It’s self funding! It’s amazing how many “clicks” we get, especially if we use a little “click bait” in the titles. “NASA Lies!” was a good one. All of the moon landing hoax videos we did are also great for views. We did this as a public service but it has become a living. A rather profitable one at that. Although now we face a lot of competition from other content providers that actually believe it, but that’s ok it still helps ring-fence the morons.

#143 Topsy-Turvy

What Musk and Bezos are doing is wasting a lot of tax payer money and enriching themselves. They are the evil version of the Flat Earth Society. They are using similar deceptions such as our own only not for good but to enrich themselves. Take Musk’s electric car with the “BBQ” function for example. Where is the electricity going to come from? Well, coal. It solves nothing. In terms of reducing CO2 emissions so far we’ve got a lot further by making smaller cars with more efficient engines than making electric race cars that are powered by coal is ever going to.

Steven Hawking, bless his soul, was working for us when he slipped the lines about “escaping the planet” into the conversation. It was a secretly veiled message to the brights, but also useful for identifying the “not so brights”. There is no where else to go. Biosphere 2 has already proven that an enclosed 2 acre greenhouse here on earth cannot sustain 8 people for 2 years without outside intervention. And that’s on earth! How are you going to even duplicate the structure on Mars, which gets a lot less sun and has no resources? It’s all talk.

As for finding other planets in space and then travelling to them, that was all about finding out how much damage Science Fiction has done to human psychology. I have no doubt that there may be millions of planets in the galaxy that either have or could have life. But they are a very, very, very long was away. It’s not like going to the moon. The nearest star to our own is 25 light years away. That means it would take 25 years to get there if you could travel at the speed of light. And then you have to hope there is a suitable planet there when you arrive. Can yo imagine packing for a 25 year camping trip? And then putting all those supplies in space? It can’t be done. A nuclear submarine can only stay submerged for a year before they run out of food, and they have the ability to make their own fresh water and oxygen from the seawater using power from the nuclear reactor.

In short, a lot of the memes running around out there are “word salads”, which means you mix a bunch of words together and then say it’s something meaningful. “Global warming”, “escaping the earth”, “green energy”, “humanitarian military intervention”, “preemptive defense”, “trickle down economics”, “supply side economics”, “fractional reserve banking”, “economic policy”, and “free trade agreements” are just a few of the many examples. They are just words stuck together that form a concept in the mind that has no real world equivalent. Everyone knows what a rock is. But a free trade agreement? If trade were free, you wouldn’t need an agreement.

This is the sort of thing we monitor and try and contain here at the Flat Earth society.

 

#183 Ace Goodheart on 06.19.18 at 7:20 am

#178 Some Guy Out West:

“One should also know that the average temperature on Venus, with a thick CO2 atmosphere, is 462 C.”

Venus is much closer to the sun. The average temperature on Mercury is 427 C, however at night it gets down to minus 180 C. Mercury doesn’t have much of an atmosphere.

Venus’s atmosphere is mostly CO2. Earth’s atmosphere is mostly Nitrogen (80% Nitrogen). There are “trace amounts (ie, less than 1%) of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Venus’s atmosphere is about 99% CO2.

So arguing that Earth will become like Venus, is really kind of “out there”. We would have to go from less than 1% CO2 to having our entire atmosphere composed of the stuff.

Global warming is a Liberal Socialist “cause” and it has been used to vacuum billions of dollars out of our pockets and into the wallets of well connected Liberal Socialist insiders.

#188 crowdedelevatorfartz on 06.19.18 at 8:19 am

@#158 IHCTD9

There is an excellent book called : The Year Without Summer 1816

Documents social, political, economic, financial ,military changes all over the world after the volcanic eruption.
Massive crop failures, food shortages, wars, etc
All caused by one volcano popping its cork.

And when one thinks that most of the planet were agrarian subsistance farmers unlike todays mostly urban city dwellers……
One shudders to think what people would revert to if the gas stopped flowing, the power went out, and the store shelves were empty……for months.

 

#197 Ace Goodheart on 06.19.18 at 9:32 am

Re: “My post was reasonably balanced and not judgmental. The climate change deniers here sound angry, spiteful and almost always resort to ad hominem arguments to bully and belittle those who have an opposite view. It vastly weakens the argument. – Garth”

It was that.

I think the problem that “climate change deniers” have is that they have been beat down too much by the climate change promoters. I mean, they are called “climate change deniers” for cripes sake. Isn’t that kind of like a loaded term?

It’s like the old loaded question “so, are you still beating your wife?” The term “climate change denier” kind of puts it out there that climate change is actually happening and people are denying it.

I’ve lived with the “global warming” group for their entire existence. I’ve watched what they do. You can’t verify their data, ever. I have tried. I have actually gone as far as to contact some of the scientists who they claim support them, only to find that these people were just giving an opinion on the supposed opinions of other people, who could not be found for comment.

I have watched government after government use climate change as an excuse to raise taxes. The Libs in Ontario raised my natural gas bill, to “fight climate change”. What did they think I was going to do, stop heating my house? Start burning wood from the backyard? Use electricity for heat (friggin expensive and not that environmentally friendly when you look at how it is generated in Ontario).

They taxed gasoline. Now we all pay $1.30 per litre. Did people stop driving their cars and walk everywhere? Do we have a choice? Should we all go out and try to order a Tesla model 3 (3 year waitlist) or go try to buy a Chevy Bolt or an E-Golf (also long wait lists)? Should we just dump our gasoline cars and spend 40K on a brand new electric car that we have to wait two years to get possession of? Just not drive to work anymore? Try to use Ontario’s wonderful public transit systems (that is me being ironic) to get where we need to go? Sit in a subway tunnel as the TTC is delayed again (like it is every week) or take a bus that takes three hours to get down the street?

All of the evidence I have read seems to suggest that the Earth is entering a cooling period, and that our warm interglacial period is coming to an end. This seems to match up with what is happening in Europe (very cold winters) and also with evidence I have read dealing with sunspots.

I know the climate changers will point out that glaciers are melting in Greenland and Antarctica. The evidence for this is just so incredibly weak though. I tried to believe in it. But if you do your reading and your research, you have to come to the conclusion that it is not possible to tell whether or not these ice caps are melting, or getting larger.

There is so little opportunity to actually study what is happening in Antarctica. You can’t get a boat anywhere near most of these glaciers. The conditions don’t allow for it. They are relying on satellite pics and isolated data from when they have actually been able to approach a glacial grounding point, which happens very rarely due to the weather conditions and the extreme and real danger of trying to navigate hundreds of kilometers inland, through partially frozen sea ice, to actually get anywhere near a glacial grounding point.

It is unfortunate that the Liberal left have decided to use the possibility of “global warming” to fleece us all. It is not, however unusual. We have been fleeced by these people before, for various reasons at various times. They always do it the same way. Find a cause, promote the crap out of it, and they introduce taxes to “fight” whatever they say is happening. And we all pay more.

All of the billions of dollars that have gone towards taxing the crap out of us, to “fight” climate change, haven’t really had any effect.

And the world does not appear to be heating up, but rather cooling down.

Then they use arguments like “well, look what happened to Venus”, a planet that has an atmosphere that is 99% CO2, versus Earth, that has less than 1% CO2 in its atmosphere.

People, as usual, have to do their own research on this and come to their own conclusions.

#206 AB Boxster on 06.19.18 at 10:31 am

The climate change deniers here sound angry, spiteful and almost always resort to ad hominem arguments to bully and belittle those who have an opposite view. It vastly weakens the argument. – Garth

———————————————————–

Your comments do betray your position Garth.
The term ‘climate change deniers’ is term used by the believers to shut down debate and discussion.

Most comments are from are those who question the science, and those who question the response, and those who question the priority. Not many ad hominems from what I read.

But pretty much everyone on the blog concedes that climate does change. There is very strong scientific evidence that much of North America was covered by 100 foot ice sheets not that long ago.
(But even with this evidence, there are very few scientists claiming that they can predict when the ‘next’ ice age will occur, unlike climate change scientists and Al Gore who seem to know that sea level will rise in the next 100 years)

The question of science, despite the belief of the Climate change enthusiasts, is never settled. Some of the science in support makes sense, but much of the rebuttal work has strong validity.
Whatever the case, what is true is that science is not based on consensus, (or David Suzuki’s musings) it is based upon scientific method.
(observation, Hypothesis, experiment, data analysis, conclusion)

Climate change is a valid theory, but the experiments and models surrounding it have proven wildly inaccurate, and recent events have shown the data to be horribly manipulated to support a conclusion.
And the ‘scientific gurus’ like Gore and Suzuki and DeCaprio spouting off dire predictions that never come true, (the world’s new religious zealots) do not help the cause.

So the science must be questioned, and to call those who do, as climate change deniers, is to try to shut down rational debate on a complex issue.
Much like calling those who do not believe in free and open borders, as racist and xenophobes. But i digress.

Secondly is the response.
Paris accord was a great party for the climate change supporters.
It was also a total waste of time in that it refused to acknowledge that the worst polluters, (China and India) needed to be held accountable.
It did decide that USA should (once again) fund the whole initiative. Hence Trump telling them to suck air.

Carbon taxes are a massive redistribution of wealth and do nothing to address the issue. And Canada, which is in effect a carbon sink with all its vast forests (this is actual science that gets conveniently ignored), is doing nothing but hurting its energy producing regions through its absurd policies.

If you want intelligent people, who support fact based and logic based policies, to get on side, then don’t implement policies that in fact and action do nothing to address the described problem.
Don’t implement polices that have no basis in fact or logic, but are based solely upon political and social ideology, and emotional argument.

Killing pipelines does not cut CO2 emissions.
Taxing the energy that heats my home gives the left wing governments more slush fund to implement their absurd social agenda, but it does not cut CO2 emissions.
Yes,it is true that in Ontario last winter, that some people had to decide whether to heat their homes, or pay the rent and maybe they decided to freeze in the dark. Carbon policy at its finest. Is that the kind of Canada we should look forward to?

Carbon pricing may be able to change behavior, but it should be revenue neutral, You want to charge me more for carbon? Fine, reduce my taxes.
But that does not happen, because governments cannot wean themselves from the new rich money teat that provide new sources of tax wealth.

The day that Canadian Liberal government applies upstream and downstream emissions to ‘every’ project that happens in Canada (new vehicle plants in Ontario, new concrete plants in Quebec, Bombardier – like I mean everything) is the day that there may be some respect from this guy.
Of course nothing will ever be built in Canada again, but at least one could argue that Liberal policy was evenly applied to all regions, and not just a way to screw with the energy producing regions, while propping up Liberal votes in the east, and virtue signalling to the world how good and wonderful Canada and T2 is.

Finally, is the priority.
Billions of people are hungry and thirsty and crap in a field.
Millions die daily from starvation and disease.
And we spend all our efforts on climate change.

The irony of it all is that those who are so sure of Climate Change do so with a religious fervor. Science is the new religion. All the while disrespecting those who believe in actual religion.

They point to the science and say ‘its settled’ and that those who disagree are anti-science, while not understanding that science is never settled and conclusions are made to be questioned, and is not ever made by ‘consensus’.

And yet their fervent belief in their data, and their science, is betrayed by the ridiculous policies that are put in place, that are not based on actual science, sound economics, or intelligent reason, but rather by the ideology of the day which is mostly leftist virtue signalling bullshit.

All the while millions live in poverty and die on a daily basis.

And you wonder why there is pushback.

Hardly an ad hominem in the comment.

“Leftist virtue signalling bullshit.” Right, no ad hominem there. – Garth

#209 Ottawan on 06.19.18 at 10:50 am

This feels a bit like shouting into a thunderstorm, but here we go…

1. If you really still believe that scientists are wrong or lying, and humans aren’t causing climate change, that’s it’s just a natural process, stop reading this now. You’re hopeless.

2. If you think Canada will be fine or even benefit from global warming, think again. We’ll see worse droughts on the prairies, sea level rise drowning BC’s Lower Mainland, and worse floods and forest fires everywhere.

3. If you think we can ignore the rest of the world, think again. Where do you think a billion refugees displaced by sea level rise and famine are going to end up? If we don’t open the gates, they’ll knock down the wall. If we could even afford to build one.

4. If you think our emissions are so small that it doesn’t matter what we do, think again. Our emissions per person are among the highest in the world. It’s cold in Sweden, too, and they emit less than half what we do. This is a global problem and everybody needs to cut emissions. Why should China and India bother cutting emissions if we won’t?

 

Wow!
And that was just a sampling of comments.