Climate Change

[S485122]

Originally Posted by MooooMoo

You're right, but this effect isn't that great. It'll take a person an hour to walk 3 miles, while the same trip can be completed by car in 5-10 minutes.

But you can count the time it takes do make the trip as a limiting factor on the humans energy expenditure only if the person dies at the end of the trip :-)

Jacob

[ewmayer]

Several other things the post about the car/person comparison ignores:

1. If one refueled with (say) plant-derived carbohydrates rather than beef, the environmental impact would be at least order of magnitude less for the non-car person;

2. How much CO2 was emitted and how many nonrenewable resources were consumed in order to manufacture that car?

3. The person walking or cycling, assuming they do it regularly, will be on average healthier than the car user, thus reducing their average healthcare cost. Unless, of course, they get hit by a car while walking or cycling, which happens with an all-too-distressing frequency, and provides a perverse disincentive to walk or cycle.

Now on to what I really wanted to post today:

Waning of London's Famous Fog Raises European Temperature, Scientists Say: London’s fog, a fixture in the U.K. capital that led to the deaths of 4,000 people in 1952, may be on the wane, contributing to warmer temperatures. Why? Cleaner air.

French-led scientists studied three decades of data from 342 weather stations across Europe and found that on average, the number of days where visibility was lower than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) has halved since 1980. The trend correlates with a fall in emissions of sulfur dioxide, a gas associated with burning coal and oil, they said yesterday in the Nature Geoscience journal.

“We’ve moved away from using coal and wood in the home and our industries have become much cleaner,” Dave Britton, a meteorologist at the U.K. government forecaster, the Met Office, said in a telephone interview from Exeter. “So we see much less of that particulate matter which allows water to condense.”

Fog and mist form when water droplets are suspended around particles in the air. The decline in fog across Europe may also have contributed to warming of the continent in recent years, said the study’s authors, led by Robert Vautard, a scientist at the French Atomic Energy Commission outside Paris.

“By enabling less energy to be received at the surface during daytime, the low-visibility phenomenon inhibits surface heating and therefore induces a lower local temperature,” the researchers wrote.

The decline in fog has raised temperatures by 0.08 degrees Celsius (0.14 Fahrenheit) per decade across Europe, or up to a fifth of the total warming observed, the scientists calculated. In eastern Europe, the drop in fog may account for half of the total warming, they said. The influence on warming of declining fog will wane in the future because there are fewer fog days to lose as the air becomes cleaner, they said.

Rising U.K. Temperatures

The Met Office’s Central England Temperature series, which includes London, shows that the average for the 30 years ending in 2008 was 9.95 degrees Celsius, up almost a half-degree from the 9.49-degree average for the 30 years ending in 1978, Britton said.

Global warming may also have contributed to the drop in fog because cooler days favor its formation, said Britton, who wasn’t involved in the study. That, coupled with the study’s finding that the drop in fog adds to warming, would make a so-called “positive feedback” whereby warmer temperatures trigger events that themselves warm the climate further, he said.

The biggest declines in days with visibility of 5 kilometers or less have taken place in northern and eastern European nations, including the U.K., Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and former members of the Soviet Union, according to the paper.

Famous Fog

London’s famous fogs date back at least 700 years when King Edward I banned the burning of a highly polluting form of coal to improve the city’s air. In the 1800s, industrialization led to fog that lingered for weeks. The so-called “Great Smog” of 1952 led to the deaths from heart and lung disease of about 4,000 people, according to the Met Office.

My Comment: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening.
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains.
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys.
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

[ewmayer]

Clean-Coal Debate Pits Al Gore, Environmentalists Against Obama, Peabody: Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection say clean-coal technology is a fantasy.

Coal is at the center of the discussion about so-called green energy because the fuel provides half of U.S. electricity -- and 30 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

The issue, framed in dueling television campaigns, is whether U.S. energy policy should be based on what is still largely an assumption: that technology can capture carbon emissions before they go into the air and store them permanently underground.

$300 Million Campaign

Portraying clean coal as a mirage, the Alliance for Climate Protection’s first commercial, shown on broadcast and cable networks starting last December, features an announcer showing off “today’s clean-coal technology” as he gestures toward empty terrain. In a new ad now running, an actor playing a coal company executive says, “Don’t worry about climate change, leave that to us.”

The commercials are the start of an ad campaign for clean energy that the group, based in Menlo Park, California, has said will cost $300 million over 3 years. Spokesman Brian Hardwick declined to say how much advertising has been purchased so far. Gore is the organization’s founder and chairman.

“We thought it was a key moment to let people know that we are faced with a climate crisis, and we shouldn’t have any illusion that clean coal exists today,” Hardwick said in an interview.

[FactorEyes]

Concerning the "threat to mankind" mentioned in the title, I have noticed that a class of people simply do not care how many species are eliminated from this planet, as long as we can keep our pets, a few farm animals to eat and furnish leather for our car seats, and enough vegetation to provide feed for those farm animals. Disney will provide our children's emotional need for animals -- it's a plus that cartoon animals talk and sing with celebrity voices! -- and we will be safe to build condos anywhere without fear of attack or intervention from pesky ecoterrorists.

I'm serious. A few years ago, I would have estimated that almost nobody seriously believes that kissing off 98% of Earth's species would be morally acceptable, or in the best interest of humanity -- which for some reason is always number one. I always figured that even those who seemed not to care but knew species were disappearing just told themselves that evolution would replace them with new ones some day, without thinking through the timescales involved.

But these days I'm less certain. Many feel that animals are best seen only in cartoons or zoos, and that really the earth is meant to provide some sort of nutritive paste we can digest while we continue to build better cities, sports venues, and highways.

Elephants? Fvck 'em! Tigers? Fvck 'em? What have polar bears and penguins done for me lately? Buh-bye! Ocean fish? Delicious, but not worth crying over. Plants and trees? Bah!

The only question is how many people subscribe to this belief. 5% of the population? Maybe as many as 15%?

[retina]

Scientists prove link between Daylight Savings and Global Warming

Originally Posted by That page above

... Suggestions have been made, ranging from the sensible (such as having a 'Darkness Savings Time' to counter the effect of Daylight Savings) to the even more sensible (such as having every beach resident collect one gallon of ocean water and pour it down the drain, thus reducing ocean levels). ...

[davieddy]

Originally Posted by retina

Scientists prove link between Daylight Savings and Global Warming

Is that a spliff in your new avatar?

[retina]

Originally Posted by davieddy

Is that a spliff in your new avatar?

I had to look up "spliff". It wasn't on the list.

[cheesehead]

Out-of-order response:

Originally Posted by FactorEyes

I would have estimated that almost nobody seriously believes that kissing off 98% of Earth's species would be morally acceptable, or in the best interest of humanity -- which for some reason is always number one. I always figured that even those who seemed not to care but knew species were disappearing just told themselves that evolution would replace them with new ones some day, without thinking through the timescales involved.

As long as the relatively small population of human species did not have significant effects on nature through environmental degradation, be it pollution or species extinction, natural selection would not weed out those humans who polluted, exterminated or otherwise degraded their environment. When effects rose to local significance, such as wiping out the main food sources within a hunting/gathering area, then as long as the tribe could move to a new less-degraded local environment it could still survive relatively unscathed -- and without having the polluting/exterminating tendencies selected-out.

Only when humans chose, or were forced, to live among their degradations of nature could natural selection have much role in determining whether polluting/exterminating tendencies were passed on to future generations (not to mention whether there were future generations). For a long, long time, the migration option was open enough to prevent significant natural selection against polluters/exterminators in the general population. Human ingenuity and social inventions compensated in most sedentary cases (so, ingenuity could be positively selected, and social inventions persist).

As our population (and per-capita scale of polluting/exterminating) increased to the point that it overwhelmed natural processes that could mitigate human degradation effects, we've seen more and more global challenges. But this has happened on such a rapid timescale, compared to the pace of natural selection, that there has been practically no time for natural evolutionary effects on our polluting/exterminating tendencies. From a population-wide evolutionary POV, it's been practically instantaneous, and the migration-into-untouched-areas option is gone.

Thus, our old polluting/exterminating tendencies persist.

I have noticed that a class of people simply do not care how many species are eliminated from this planet, as long as we can keep our pets, a few farm animals to eat and furnish leather for our car seats, and enough vegetation to provide feed for those farm animals.

Our reasoning and perception skills are not good enough for everyone to "naturally" understand and perceive the long-term indirect threats involved in such things. Education, technology, and other social structures can compensate, but imperfectly. Our DNA doesn't carry such information, so we have to keep educating our offspring and maintaining complex social structures.

I'm serious.

Yup.

the best interest of humanity -- which for some reason is always number one.

Natural selection has favored such self-regard for a long time.

Many feel that animals are best seen only in cartoons or zoos, and that really the earth is meant to provide some sort of nutritive paste we can digest while we continue to build better cities, sports venues, and highways.

It was good enough for the Stone Age, and evolutionarily that was just yesterday.

Elephants? Fvck 'em! Tigers? Fvck 'em? What have polar bears and penguins done for me lately? Buh-bye! Ocean fish? Delicious, but not worth crying over. Plants and trees? Bah!

The only question is how many people subscribe to this belief. 5% of the population? Maybe as many as 15%?

I think practically everyone is born with the basic polluting/exterminating tendencies. Most of us are educated enough when young to modify most of the most dangerous of those tendencies. Societies have developed ways to protect against some. Advances in technology haven't yet left us with any inborn propensity to consider global effects when tempted to pollute/exterminate locally.

[__HRB__]

It is amazing how many people believe, that the same people who cannot even predict the tax revenue for the next year and plan their budgets accordingly, are fit to take measures that have a direct and intended effect on the Earth's climate.

Whether climate change is happening or not the cost of prevention will always be higher that the cost of adaption, because the one thing that is certain, is that the following fallacy will predominate:

1. We must do something.
2. X is something.
3. Therefore we must do X.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by __HRB__

It is amazing how many people believe, that the same people who cannot even predict the tax revenue for the next year and plan their budgets accordingly, are fit to take measures that have a direct and intended effect on the Earth's climate.

Sort of a reverse of the "If we can put a man on the Moon, we can [end poverty, stop disease, end hunger, prevent war, ...]?" argument, eh? Since we can't do X, it's not believable that we can do Y.

The two are not comparable, of course, because the people (not) doing the first task are politicians and bureaucrats, while the people addessing the second task are engineers and scientists, who are designing plans that will have to be implemented by politicians and bureaucr ... hmmm ... well, there may be something in common after all.

Whether climate change is happening or not the cost of prevention will always be higher that the cost of adaption,

... and that's why the Dutch have built dikes instead of raising their buildings on stilts?

This pessimistic argument fails because it presumes that people cannot (or, perhaps, it might even be intended to persuade people not to) diligently search for and find cost-effective methods of prevention.

because the one thing that is certain, is that the following fallacy will predominate:

1. We must do something.
2. X is something.
3. Therefore we must do X.

Yes, that's fallacious, all right: step 3 presumes another, unstated (and false) step -- 2a. X is the only choice.

[retina]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Yes, that's fallacious, all right: step 3 presumes another, unstated (and false) step -- 2a. X is the only choice.

I thought that point 1 was the fallacy. It should be "1. We must do something sensible, reasonable and useful".