Reply To: DREAD Weapon System: Devastating, Jam proof, silent

[Brian H]

vansig wrote:

Well, you know my take on all that, PD. We should be using much MORE energy, supplied by FF. But I worry that we will short-change the atmosphere of CO2. It needs as much as it can get. If it were possible, we should pump up levels to 1,000 ppm; agriculture and gardening would be SO much easier. Have to mow the lawn a lot more often, tho’. :coolgrin:

So if i understand you, Brian, you want sea ice to disappear, and the tundra’s methane to be released? it looks like it’s headed that way, no matter what humans do. The Milankovitch cycle is indicating continued warming in the northern hemisphere for the next ~2650 years. The risks now are: ocean acidification (since the ocean can hold about a hundred times the concentration of CO2 as the air), and large-scale shifts in gulf stream and jet-stream, which cause rapid changes to local ecosystems.

What’s your take on this stuff, http://www.johannhari.com/2010/01/25/ignore-james-hansens-climate-predictions-at-your-peril ?
Hansen is a prostitute for GW; he ceased being a scientist decades ago. His ex-supervisor regrets not firing him when he began doing advocacy on the job at NASA in the ’80s instead of research.

The sea ice and acidification and methane scares are all hooey.
–Arctic sea ice in the last 2 years is increasing vs the previous 5. The previous reduction is now acknowledged to have been the result of a counter-cyclical wind pattern that happens every few centuries for unknown reasons, which rapidly drives the ice out past Baffin Island, etc. Antarctica is net-net gaining ice, in the east where it always builds up. Many thousands of years later it falls off the continent in West Antarctica. So any current surge of break-offs there are the result of extra large ice buildup and flows that occurred millennia ago. Nothing to do with us, or even with sea temperatures.
–The slight predicted reduction in the alkaline balance of the oceans (not “acidification”!) is a small fraction of the range experienced by ocean organisms throughout paleohistory, while they were evolving – including many types of coral.
–To melt enough of the world’s glaciers and icecaps to significantly affect ocean levels would take centuries or millennia even at the upper levels of the phony temperature model “scenarios”. Worldwide, glacier retreat/advance is not far off the historical average; it’s been going on (documented) for at least 2 or 3 centuries. Nothing to do with us.
–Tundra and other methane releases have been going on for millennia, and then reversing. When do you think all the plant matter that made up the peat and methane etc. up there grew? Methane, in any case, has a very brief lifespan in the atmosphere, somewhere between 9 and 14 years. There would be a spike, but since H2O is even more potent, and far more abundant, and operates (contrary to the thoroughly unphysical and disproven and arbitrary and nearly insane assertions of the Warmists) as a negative-feedback governor on the system, there would be no serious “heat wave”.
–The Gulf Stream “switch” prediction has been quietly withdrawn, because it’s not happening. Facts are so inconvenient. The actual past shift of the GS occurred when a sudden huge surge of cold water trapped inland in North America from the melting of the Ice Age super-glaciers found an outlet to the Atlantic. There is some dispute about whether it went eastward, or up through the Arctic. In any case, nothing to do with warming/desalination as postulated by the Warmists.

–Finally, MUCH warmer periods in history have been boom times for humanity, with expansion of population, culture, wealth, and nutrition. Vice versa for cooling periods. So — pray for warming!