By endorsing false motivation, you imply that your judgment is superior to others and that is justification to mislead others to take the path that you consider the best. I have a high regard for your intelligence and integrity, but even so, I have problems with that method of manipulation. This is especially true with a topic that is as important as global warming.

My bold:
If you allow me to change had to could have then I can give you a great example. It is the pumping of co2 into the ocean removing it from the air. Just Google: ‘pumping co2 into ocean’

Notice that you will get over 700,000 hits and you can scan the hits and see that organizations and companies are proudly removing co2 from the atmosphere and hiding it in the ocean.

CO2 is heavier than air and a sudden release into the atmosphere would cause the gas to flow near the ground, where it would form a blanket that would smother all life in its path. The danger of storing gaseous CO2 has been demonstrated by natural disasters caused by sudden releases of carbon dioxide.

Google: ‘lake nyos’ and read about 1800 people that died in 1986 when the lake overturned releasing a cloud of co2 gas that passed through their village killing almost everyone in it.

Not all people and organizations that come up with the idea of hiding co2 start doing it without looking at all of the dangers. The ones that understand what happened at Lake Nyos would never simply pump it into the ocean, cave or dried up oil well without having a carefully thought out safety plan. Unfortunately looking at the 700,000 hits on Google too few have taken the time to understand the risk.

Jim

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Grrrr..I hate having to defend GW....

Oddly enough, most scientists can figure out how much CO2 you can dissolve into a volume of sea water. Lake Nyos was a very special case. Even if you dissolved all of the 10^14 kg of atmo CO2 in the 10^21 kg of ocean, it is unlikely you could get a Lake Nyos

Thanks Korjik,

I grimaced when I heard about what some were doing without (me) taking the time to fully understand how they were doing it. What I found since reading your reply was some are simply dissolving the co2 in the water like you said; others are liquefying it and pumping it to the ocean floor greater than 300m. From what I understand Lake Nyos is 208m deep and cold at the bottom which keeps the co2 from bubbling up to the surface. Others are looking at placing the co2 in liquid form into large storage bags on the ocean floor at depths greater than 300m.

I found this U of M site helpful: http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2005/Nov05/r110305

Wouldn’t the storage of large volumes of liquid co2 300m deep or deeper present a potential problem like Lake Nyos?

Jim

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We do it all the time, this is my point. A coach tells his players that victory is important, and the media plays along, making it a self-fulfilling prophesy. A company tells its employees that they are paid in proportion to the value they create, until they can find no company that actually will. A culture creates a "wedding day" celebration and a promise of "marital bliss" (stop and think about that) to generate incentive for forming permanent relationships, and the family structure survives. A religion promises afterlife rewards to promote good behavior, and people function in a community. The examples go on and on, the human condition is practically run on the principle of false, or at least unproven, motivations. We end up supporting what we think is best in the long run, never mind the way we "psyche ourselves up" for the task.
Thank you, and I don't mean to suggest that skepticism on the current evidence is a sign of evil intentions, or that the statistics you quote cannot be a part of a logical dissenting argument. I am merely pointing out that I see a kind of "double standard" of evidential requirements for motivating humans to be conscious of their impact on the environment, compared to all the other ways we try to motivate behavior! We need to include our effects on the environment in the decisions we make, but we do want the science to be as correct and unbiased as we can make it-- we don't want to be pressured by special interests, nor do we want to "jump on a bandwagon" motivated by hysteria. We want to do what is best for humanity, but that means internalizing the impact on the environment, to the best of our ability to do so, even if we don't know we're right.

Actually, the big problem with pumping CO₂ into the ocean is that it acidifies it, and this screws up the Ph and is being blamed for damage to things like coral reefs and other aquatic life.

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Right-- and it doesn't make sense to fix one important environment by messing up another. But that's all at the level of debating what solutions are possible. The first issue is not what is the right course to take, it is what are the right factors to include when deciding on the right course to take. The level of the debate is still at that point, because policymakers are still not, by and large, internalizing environmental considerations, and won't until their constituents decide to make it a priority. Good science can then determine how best to internalize those considerations, and if the science makes errors, it can rely on its self-correcting capabilities-- always mindful that reversible actions are preferable to irreversible ones.

And that makes it right.

It makes it what we do. Are we to wake up tomorrow and be something else? Is our culture going to "fix" its inconsistencies? In the mean time, we need to start including environmental influences, using our best science, without fear that someone will cherry-pick that one particular issue and say "we can't prove it o we shouldn't invest in it"-- and then go out and buy a magazine with an anorexic 22 year old on the cover.

Shouldn't we wake up tomorrow and attempt to do better?

Actually, I think we are talking past each other. I feel that you are talking about motivation and I'm talking about deception and misdirection.

I see your contention as being something like: "let's do something that will reduce human CO2 output. Even if it doesn't help all that much toward that goal, it will reduce other pollution."

My contention is that reducing pollution is a valid goal, but I'm not sure that the efforts targeted to reduce CO2 will have a beneficial effect on the global climate. Therefore, if reducing pollution is the goal, programs that efficiently target pollution would be a better way to spend our resources.

When you asked for an example, I cited the biofuel effort. This program has very real costs, not just re-distribution of wealth. It saps our resources. It does little to fight pollution, may actually be responsible for more (not less) CO2 released into the atmosphere, and it is directly linked to increased food prices and shortages. Whatever the motivation, if my interpretation of the effect of the biofuel effort is correct, it is a program that should be abandoned.

Actually my first post in this thread was on a completely different track. The way I interpreted a short term graph (20 years) indicated that the global temperature had a negligible increase in a 25 year span. Yes, I extrapolated and the backing for my logic was paper thin, but it was not an unrealistic conjecture and no one here has challenged it. I still wonder that if my conjecture proves to be valid, if the models that we rely on so heavily have accounted for such a span or if they are at least able to accommodate such a span.

Yes, we should wake up and attempt to start using our best science to try and include our affects on our environment; without using the "cost" of doing so as an excuse. Or, alternatively, we should start taking into account the costs of all the other things we accept without a second thought-- I'd be pretty happy either way.
I think we can agree that deception and misdirection are bad things, what isn't clear is on which side of the GW debate they are deployed. All I'm saying is that there is one camp that is basically saying, let's include our effects on the planet in the costs of what we do, and the other side is saying, that would cost too much, fill 'er up and stop worrying. Yes we do want to have the best science, but that is not at all the current issue. Let's say a carbon tax was put into place, and the best science started concluding that carbon wasn't as bad as thought-- the tax goes down, whoopee. Or the best science concludes the carbon is worse than we thought, and the tax goes up. You know, kind of like how everything else works. What is the resistance to doing this? It is the very concept that environmental impact should be included at all, that is what is really on the table here. So yes, if we need a wakeup call to include global climate change in our calculations, then so be it-- we need motivation to do the right thing, that's ingrained everywhere you look.
It's more like "reducing CFCs to save the ozone layer was pretty cheap, so we could get corporations to go along with that, but we'll need a wider mandate to get them to go along with fossil-fuel related environmental constraints". We need our best science to decide what the impact is, and that may and should be debated, but the real hurdle is going to be the very principle of any kind of regulation on the side effects of energy usage. I won't delve into politics, but when California is blocked from regulating automobile emissions by, of all people, the EPA, we have something amiss in who is listening to science in the first place. So science feels it has to hit back by making dire predictions just to be listened to at all. Maybe the dire predictions are good science, and maybe they are over-interpreted, I don't know-- but I do know when someone is trying to make some noise to bring focus onto global environmental issues, and I have a hard time seeing that as an irresponsible use of science.
And your arguments to that effect don't have any obvious flaws, to someone like myself who does not know any climatology and does not even know if there is such thing as dependable climatology. But I'm willing to entertain the notion that there is, and to look at their conclusions, without calling them conspiracy theorists or bandwagon jumpers.

I would say the goal is simply to internalize the externalities of energy usage. That means when we use energy, we need to pay for it in a way the reflects the total cost of that energy use to humanity-- not just the cost to pump it and refine it, but also the cost on the environment to do so. There is one side of this issue that sees that very concept as heretical and seditious, and I feel that is what drives the debate far more so than the climatology. The scientific issue is, do we use our science to make decisions about how to internalize the externalities that are not automatically included in an economy, or do we accuse scientists as having political motives and ignore their attempts to responsibly assess the full cost of energy? I say we continue to look at arguments like yours in making that assessment-- but first we have to include a means to incorporate the current conclusions into the cost of energy, and that might require some "motivation".
I think the jury is still out on biofuel. It is an infant market. Yes, we should get back to that, it's the main issue of the thread. I would claim that your analysis over-weights the last year of data, which is merely a statistical blip but draws attention simply by being at one end of the data string. Either ignoring that blip, or taking in future data that shows it to be a random variation, the picture that will emerge from the 20-year graph is that the temperature rose significantly from 1990 to 2000, and the appearance of plateaus is a trick of the eye. That is also borne out by the 5-year running mean data I linked to above, which smooths over variations that tend to draw the eye away from the general trends, and shows a fairly steady increase for 50 years.

Data in the next 2-3 years should help a lot to clarify this issue.

I'm 82 years old. During my lifetime I have seen a tremendous improvement in air quality. When I was a boy you hardly ever saw blue sky in winter months because of smoke. Every house and business had a smoke stack and they discharged tremendous amounts of particulates into the atmosphere. I believe the suscessful effort to improve air quality by eliminating particulate emisions has contributed to global warming by reducing solar energy reflection

That may be-- but thank you for showing that "cost" need not deter us from seeking an environment we would care to live in. Perhaps we can beat all the environmental problems we choose to beat, and solving one will not always compromise solutions to another.

I agree with the points made by Ken. Meanwhile, since we´re talking about anecdotal evidences, in my neck of the woods this summer has indeed been [or felt like] the coolest I remember since my early youth. I hate warmth, so bring on the Global Dimming!

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I'm not sure what you mean by 'other things' but it might explain why you are so quick to shrug off the costs I'm concerned with. To me, it is all about cost. The whole idea of mitigating the effects of climate change is based on reducing the cost of doing nothing. If there is no concern about the cost of changing sea levels, etc. then why even worry about global warming? In this arena the currency of cost is lives, health, and standard of living... not just dollars. Included in standard of living is the luxury of being able to advance technologically.

It's clear to me that neither side has a monopoly on that.

Both sides are worrying about the cost of something. It's a matter of coming to agreement on which costs to accept. Everyone has a vested interested that their portion of the cost is kept to a minimum. i.e. global warming advocates are worried about the cost of Miami buying snorkels for their citizens and the skeptics are concerned about reduced capability to feed the world.

Are you being deliberately naive? The tax will probably be renamed, not reduced. Also, if the carbon isn't as bad as thought, the credibility of the next concern will be that much harder to establish. Look at how often the global cooling concerns a few decades ago are brought up.

Not everyone is convinced that the attention to CO2 reduction is the right thing. That's the point. We have all these studies and models about sea level change and the devastation that will ensue, but the consequences of cutting back enough to be significant has an even greater the potential of creating economic disaster... that includes the starvation of millions and the reduction of capacity to deal with the consequences of any climate change that occurs. We are a long way away from being able to understand the weather enough to start trying to control it on such a massive scale.

As mentioned above, you're looking at a credibility gap. No one understands the predictive climate models. The only thing most people can use to base their judgment on is their trust in the few people that have some understanding of the methods of prediction. If those predictions show obvious flaws, none of them will be trusted. That is why Gore's movie might prove to be more of a detriment than a help to the global warming cause.

It is probably impossible to calculate the cost to the environment as one has to contend with economic models that are every bit as complex as weather ones. Some of the cost happens automatically. i.e. China is paying the cost for their pollution in many painful ways. The preparations for the Olympics is giving the world a glimpse to the costs of doing nothing.

Neither. Science should try to access the effects of energy production and use, the economists should relate this information into costs and benefits, and the politicians have the responsibility to determine how we react to this information. They are the ones I accuse of having political motives.

From what I've read about it, it's a good argument for infanticide.

Agreed, my analysis is predicated on the acceptance of the data in last few months. Yes, it shows a significant rise in 2000. The graph also shows a stabilization for the next several years. The last quarter 'blip' is significant because it is so dramatic it will affect the average once the more generalized methods catch up.

Decisions are being made now that are based on predictions of models. I wonder if these models have accounted for the information obtained since the 2000 rise. If the rebound from the last series of points isn't greater than 50%, then, there will have been no indication of warming for over 10 years. This is in a period where temperature data collection has been refined and the models were predicting accelerating warming.

Do we have the luxury of 2-3 years? We may be committed to disastrous programs by then.