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From: William Hyde <wthyde1953@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: What is YOUR view?
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2024 20:23:24 -0400
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RonO wrote:
> On 4/7/2024 5:55 PM, William Hyde wrote:
>> RonO wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> We are putting out a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Some 
>>> people worry about methane, but the effect is likely negligible 
>>> because methane doesn't last very long in the atmosphere. 
>>
>>
>> They are right to worry.  The effect of CH4 is about .5 Watts per 
>> square meter as compared to pre-industrial times.  Crudely speaking, 
>> this accounts for about a quarter of a degree of warming.
>>
>> Why is it so?  Well, the mean lifetime of CH4 in the atmosphere is not 
>> that short, being about 11 years.  As it is far more effective at 
>> absorbing IR than CO2 it can add a lot of heat before it is gone.
>>
>> When it does break down, some of it becomes stratospheric water 
>> vapour, which is an excellent greenhouse gas itself.  And this effect 
>> lasts.
>>
>> The effect of a unit of methane put into the atmosphere, over a 
>> century, is still larger than that of a unit of CO2, though the CH4 
>> will be long gone at the end of that period.
>>
>> It's short lifetime hasn't stopped us from increasing the amount in 
>> the atmosphere. CO2 levels have not yet doubled from pre-industrial 
>> times, but CH4 is up 160%.
>>
>> Finally, the bio-geochemistry of CH4 works against us.  As the world 
>> warms, microbes more actively devour our stock of sequestered organic 
>> carbon, producing more CH4 and CO2.  Arctic soils, in particular, hold 
>> vast amounts of frozen organic matter - far more  than tropical soils. 
>> Field experiments have shown that the rate at which arctic areas are 
>> giving off greenhouse gases is increasing. This positive feedback 
>> could grow very nasty indeed.
>>
>>   We likely did
>>> accelerate global warming with our increased output of carbon 
>>> dioxide, but we did it at a time when global temperatures had already 
>>> been increasing for thousands of years.
>>
>> Time scales matter.
>>
>> The earth has warmed about 4C since the last glacial maximum about 20k 
>> years ago, most of that in the first 10k.  We have now warmed the 
>> earth one degree C in less than two centuries.  And eight billion of 
>> us depend on the ecosystems which were well adjusted to that earlier 
>> climate.
>>
>> It appears that already forests in parts of the world are no longer 
>> stable ecosystems.  Many will be replaced by more fire-resistant (and 
>> less useful) trees, or by grass or scrub.   And that's just the 
>> beginning.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> We need to better define what the crisis is.
>>>
>>> We probably should be nearing the end of the current warming period. 
>>> For the last million years we have had the 100,000 year ice age 
>>> cycles. The earth has been cooling for the last 3 million years, but 
>>> for the last million we went to a cycle of around a hundred thousand 
>>> years of cold interspersed with 20 to 30 thousand years of warmer 
>>> climate.  The temperatures of the cycles seem to have become more 
>>> extreme in the last 500,000 years.  The last warm period got warmer 
>>> than it is now, and more ice melted and sea levels were 20 meters 
>>> higher than they are now.
>>
>>
>> Eemian warmth was different.  At this time the orbital eccentricity 
>> was more than double the current value.  With perihelion occurring in 
>> summer,  this led to strong increases in summer temperatures, 
>> decreases in winter.  The obliquity was also larger, meaning more heat 
>> in higher latitudes.
>>
>> The problem is that our temperature proxies are mostly summer ones - 
>> winter does not leave us a lot of records. Tropical records can also 
>> be difficult to work with, so there is a bias towards temperate and 
>> polar records.   Eemian warmth is mainly summer warmth, and not 
>> directly comparable to our little experiment which will be year-round 
>> warmth, with a bias towards winter and higher latitudes.
>>
>> And, once more, the Eemian world did not have to support eight billion
>> people.
>>
>>
>>    We
>>> have not reached that point, yet in this cycle, so things are not yet 
>>> as bad as they got without human industrial interference.
>>>
>>> There was an article put up on TO, maybe a decade ago, that claimed 
>>> that the current carbon dioxide levels could prevent a recession into 
>>> another ice age.
>>
>>
>> As one of the authors of such a paper, I have to disagree with your 
>> interpretation.
>>
>>
>>
>>    We might delay the next ice age.  This really doesn't seem to
>>> be that bad. 
>>
>>
>> Nor would it be good.  Ice ages begin very slowly in human terms.  If 
>> we still are an industrial society when the next one comes along - 
>> some time in the next twenty thousand years - we will be able to deal 
>> with it.
>>
>> Worrying about a future ice age at this point is equivalent to Julius 
>> Caesar worrying about world war II.
>>
>>
>>   We got a taste of what things would be like when
>>> temperatures fell for the mini ice age that started in the 1300's and 
>>> didn't end until the start of the industrial revolution that is 
>>> supposed to be responsible for our current global warming. 
>>
>>
>> The little ice age ended well before CO2 from industry became a 
>> significant factor in climate.  It has been shown that stratospheric 
>> aerosols caused by increased volcanism account for about 60% of the 
>> little ice age cooling.  Given the noisy data, that's about as good as 
>> can expect, though solar, GHG and land-use effects were also accounted 
>> for.
>>
>>
>>
>>    The earth has seen
>>> warmer climates that had more ice melting and sea levels rising to 
>>> the levels that they claim may occur this time, but they obviously 
>>> happened before.  So the regions that will be flooded will just be a 
>>> repeat of what happened last time a hundred thousand years ago.
>>
>> You are drawing parallels where there are no parallels.  See above.
>>
>>
>> William Hyde
>>
> 
> It looks like you didn't comment relevantly on that topic, just denied 
> it with no discussion. 


Really?  You started with the claim that methane is not an important 
greenhouse gas, and I went into some detail to show that it in fact is.

Then you went on to speculate that global warming might save us from an 
oncoming ice age, and I reminded you that while an ice age is coming 
soon in geological time, it is very far away in human time, while damage 
from global warming is not.

I did not mention ocean acidification, another consequence of our 
atmospheric pollution.   I gather from biologists that this is also 
rather important.


  The paper that was put up on TO did predict that
> we might skip the next ice age.

Actually this is not a new idea.  I first saw reference to in in an 
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