Originally posted by Shakyamunison
That study is based on dormant volcanic emissions world wide.
they explicitly aren't actually:
To lay out a clear answer, Gerlach compiled the available estimates of CO2 emissions from all global volcanic activity on land and undersea and compared them with estimates for human emissions. He published the compilation in Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.Researchers estimate the amounts of carbon dioxide released by terrestrial volcanic eruptions by methods including remote sensing or flying through clouds of erupting volcanic gas, and by measuring certain isotope concentrations near undersea volcanoes. Carbon dioxide is dissolved in magma at great depths and is released as the magma rises to the surface.
...
"The main reason, I think, that this myth persists," Gerlach said: "First of all, the emissions are extremely spectacular. When people see volcanic eruptions on television and it's awesome, and it's very easy for people to imagine that huge amounts of CO2 are being emitted to the atmosphere."
"However, these spectacular volcanic explosions that are so stunning on TV last only a few hours," he added. "They are ephemeral. In contrast, the sources of anthropogenic CO2 (smokestacks, exhaust pipes, etc) are comparatively unspectacular, commonplace, and familiar, and in addition they are ubiquitous, ceaseless, and relentless. They emit CO2 24/7."
...
In yet another comparison, Gerlach reported that in order for volcanic emissions to match those made by humans, the May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens eruption would need to happen every 2.5 hours. The June 15, 1991, Mount Pinatubo eruption would need to occur every 12.5 hours.
so, where are you getting your info from.... ?
Originally posted by Shakyamunison
I am talking about one Tora Bora like eruption.
Tora Bora in Afghanistan?
I assume you mean Bora Bora, cool, how much CO2 was put into the air in that eruption? You know, considering it erupted 4 million years ago, ffs, give me some decent numbers 😛
Pinatubo, the second largest eruption in the 20th century, released only .05 tons of CO2. Maybe these other eruptions are larger, they certainly wouldn't account for one such eruption every 12.5 hours per year. Unless you want to actually provide some data [haha, I know I know, silly me]
I meant Tambora, but Bora Bora would be fine.
We should move away from all volcanoes.
If supervolcanoes can spew out vast amounts of carbon, then why hasn't a runaway greenhouse effect happened in the past? Why it's Earth like Venus?
In 20 years there will be some other "the sky is falling" that some people will capitalize on, and make lots of money.
Fin
Originally posted by Shakyamunison
I meant Tambora, but Bora Bora would be fine.We should move away from all volcanoes.
If supervolcanoes can spew out vast amounts of carbon, then why hasn't a runaway greenhouse effect happened in the past? Why it's Earth like Venus?
In 20 years there will be some other "the sky is falling" that some people will capitalize on, and make lots of money.
Fin
Originally posted by Shakyamunison
If supervolcanoes can spew out vast amounts of carbon, then why hasn't a runaway greenhouse effect happened in the past? Why it's Earth like Venus?
There have been massive climate shifts in the past. Lots of things die.
Supervolcanoes are also a one time input of CO2. Much like how being stuck with a needle is easily survivable but being stabbed thousands of times is considerably less so. We've also been destroying off many of the stabilizing factors that corrected for greenhouse gas increases in the past.
Originally posted by Shakyamunison
I meant Tambora, but Bora Bora would be fine.
ok, both of these eruptions occured before humans recorded such things, but we can sort of compare what was measured.
Tephra refers to the amount of volcanic rock that is erupted into the air when a volcano goes off. CO2 emissions from a volcano are dwarfed by this. For instance, in the Pinatubo eruption, 11 cubic km (km^3) of tephra was put into the air, along with .05 tons of CO2.
In Tambora, 150 km^3 was put in the air. Krakatoa only 20 km^3. Though it is only a rough sketch to assume a similar tephra/CO2 ratio, if we use Pinatubo as a starting off point, we could say Tambora produced 15x the CO2 Pinatubo did and Krakatoa only about 2x. Even at 15x (even at 100x for that matter), Tambora comes nowhere close to the CO2 emissions of humans.
Bora Bora was a series of volcanoes that went dead and were eventually worn away by rainfall, millions of years ago. There is no real evidence they had any exceptionally large eruptions.
Additionally, this is entirely a red herring. Even if we found a single volcano at some point in history that had a single eruption that produced as much CO2 as humans are now, that would be irrelevant. If Bora Bora had an eruption that produced 10000000000 tons of CO2 4 million years ago, that would not be a cause of modern climate change. We know what the largest eruptions in the past 100 years have been, and they are nothing compared to human industry in terms of putting CO2 in the atmosphere.
obviously these numbers are not entirely accurate, for instance, Wiki says Mt Saint Helen's produced just over 1/30th of the tephra of Pinatubo but 1/5 of the CO2, however given the fact that human industry produces 35 tons a year, this discrepancy is essentially moot. A volcano would need to produce several hundred times more CO2 than Pinatubo, and it doesn't really matter anyways, because those types of volcanoes are not currently erupting.
Originally posted by Shakyamunison
If supervolcanoes can spew out vast amounts of carbon, then why hasn't a runaway greenhouse effect happened in the past? Why it's Earth like Venus?
the vastly greater amount of tephra put in the air blocks sunlight from reaching the earth and prevents the greenhouse effect from occurring. If volcanoes produced more CO2 than tephra, you might see the opposite, but like OV said, massive volcanoes are associated with cooling, not warming.
Earth is not like Venus for a number of reasons... including the fact that they are completely different planets.
Originally posted by Shakyamunison
In 20 years there will be some other "the sky is falling" that some people will capitalize on, and make lots of money.
yes, you have definitely proven yourself knowledgeable enough to make such statements.
wow, they could have been interviewing people from this thread:
Climate skeptics still not worriedWe asked climate skeptics for their opinions on recent extreme weather events. You can probably guess their answers
By Alyssa Battistoni
A firefighter works a burnout operation on the north flank of the Fontenelle Fire outside Big Piney, Wyoming, July 4, 2012.
(Credit: Reuters/Jim Urquhart)With huge swaths of the mountain West in flames, chunks of the eastern seaboard suffering power outages after a massive storm, and nearly three-quarters of the lower 48 experiencing dry or drought conditions, extreme weather has been on everyone’s mind — with climate change not far behind.
Concerned scientists certainly saw an opportunity to get a message across: In a telephone briefing last week, Princeton geosciences professor Michael Oppenheimer said, “What we’re seeing is a window into what global warming really looks like. It looks like heat, it looks like fires, it looks like this kind of environmental disaster … This provides vivid images of what we can expect to see more of in the future.”
Maybe this would be the moment that the visceral reality of disaster broke through the political fog. League of Conservation Voters president Gene Karpinski thought it might, saying he hoped that “record-breaking temperatures, intense droughts and wildfires and other climate-related disasters” would act as “a wakeup call” for the dangers posed by climate change.
So I called a couple of well-known climate “skeptics” to see what they had to say about the crazy weather. Sure, one fire or storm, however bad, is hardly conclusive evidence, but might the visions of a hellish future prompt a sense of urgency strong enough to jar even the slightest change of heart? You can probably already guess the answer.
When I chatted with William O’Keefe, formerly the COO of the American Petroleum Institute and current fellow at the George C. Marshall Institute, a Koch-funded conservative think tank, he was exceedingly polite as he dismissed climate scientists’ warnings, saying, “The advocates for catastrophic human-induced climate change will use any event to advance their proposition.” He explained, “I am troubled by people who latch onto any event to say this proves or disproves climate change … the climate system is incredibly complex and it may take decades for us to understand it enough to create a model that allows us to understand what will happen in the future.”
He’s right that we shouldn’t attribute any one event to climate change, and that there’s a lot we still don’t know about climate systems; few scientists would argue otherwise. But there’s a whole lot we do know, and waiting decades until we do anything at all is the kind of logic only a former Exxon lobbyist could come up with. The thing is, there aren’t many people these days who deny that climate change is happening at all; even among Republicans, a plurality of voters believe climate change is occurring. Instead, self-styled “skeptics” offer a patchwork of arguments designed to obfuscate the issue, cautioning that we don’t really understand what’s going on, that we don’t know how much humans are really contributing, that scientists are just out for grant money, and besides, won’t somebody please think of the poor? They seek out the fringe scientists who support their opinions, and use scientific-sounding arguments to counter the scientific consensus; they’re just reasonable enough to sound legitimate to anyone who’s not well acquainted with the evidence.
So even the notoriously crackpot Heartland Institute, which recently equated global warming activists to the Unabomber, uses scientific language in support of its totally insane ideas. James Taylor, Heartland’s senior fellow for environmental policy, told me, “It’s important to keep in mind the factual data in addition to what’s in the media, because they have an interest in selling newspapers and getting viewers, and even scientists have an interest in getting grants to keep this supposed global warming crisis going.” Said Taylor, “This is what happens with the global warming issue, because there’s always someplace in the world where there’s high temperatures, where there’s drought, where there’s a storm. They’ll take these anomalous issues and use them to spread the myth that global warming is involved.”
When people like Taylor depict those who are concerned about climate change as “alarmists” and doomsayers, those who object to doing anything set themselves up to play the part of the “reasonable middle”: They can acknowledge that something funny is going on while insisting that we don’t know enough to do anything about it. And so denial becomes less a battle over facts than a waiting game, with appeals to scientific knowledge used as a delay tactic rather than a wakeup call; it’s concern trolling, climate-style. All those invested in the status quo need to do is create enough uncertainty to delay action indefinitely.
Public officials have picked up on the tactics of professional deniers. Cory Gardner, a Republican representative from Colorado, co-sponsored a bill last year that would have revoked the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, and has said that “I think the climate is changing, but I don’t believe humans are causing that change to the extent that’s been in the news.” After the High Park Fire torched 87,000 acres and 257 homes in his district, he didn’t pull the Mother Nature card in claiming that human action played no role whatsoever in the fire — rather, he pointed to a federal roadless area policy as a culprit in the pine beetle infestation that left thousands of dead trees standing like kindling, with nary a mention of the fact that the warm winter allowed the pests to survive. While neither he nor Colorado Springs Rep. Doug Lamborn responded to requests for comment, they didn’t have to — they’re winning by default.
What should be clear by now is that there’s not going to be one event that we can unequivocally attribute to climate change; the factors involved in weather and disaster events are too complex, and there will always be someone explaining — not entirely incorrectly — that something other than climate is the real culprit, or that freak events happen naturally. That certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about climate change as a factor in extreme weather far more than we do now: A paltry 3 percent of mainstream news organizations even mentioned it during coverage of the wildfires. But it does means that there isn’t going to be one moment of truth when everyone realizes that climate change is in fact taking place, let alone a moment when climate deniers suddenly see the light and change their tune.
More generally, it’s foolish to expect disasters to bring about the changes we want to see. The catastrophic BP oil spill, for example, didn’t do much to change Louisiana’s relationship to the oil industry — in fact, the state’s senators were among the loudest voices for reopening the coast to drilling as soon as possible, with hardly even a nod to enhanced safety measures. Relatively limited technical changes are far more likely to come out of disaster events than deeper structural ones, and officials are motivated to reestablish “normality” as soon as possible. When it comes to climate change, though, going back to normal means continuing with business-as-usual, which means catastrophic effects are almost guaranteed down the road. And while extreme weather events and disasters have the potential to serve as focusing events or “teachable moments,” they also put a strain on already-tight local, state and federal budgets, diminishing our ability to actually invest in mitigation and preparation, let alone deal with other problems.
So, will climate disasters be our wakeup call? Maybe eventually, but I wouldn’t count on it. Expecting any one event — or even several events — to suddenly change the politics of climate change so that we’re all on the same page is not a strategy for success. And hoping that climate deniers who are deeply invested in their positions will be shocked into changing them isn’t a very good bet. We can’t wait for a disaster to save us; we’re going to have to do the work ourselves. So the next time someone says the U.S. will do something about climate change when things get bad enough, or that people will wake up to climate change when a disaster strikes, or that we’ll believe in climate change when we see it, remind them it’s already here.
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/05/climate_skeptics_still_not_worried/
people like ddm and shaky fulfilling their own self fulfilling prophecies?
EDIT: sorry, that last part wasn't fair, technically ddm has just said global warming will be beneficial, not that there is nothing we can do about it. disregard his name s.v.p
Originally posted by inimalist
wow, they could have been interviewing people from this thread:http://www.salon.com/2012/07/05/climate_skeptics_still_not_worried/
people like ddm and shaky fulfilling their own self fulfilling prophecies?
EDIT: sorry, that last part wasn't fair, technically ddm has just said global warming will be beneficial, not that there is nothing we can do about it. disregard his name s.v.p
You could try to troll less.
I never said that it would be perfectly beneficial with no harm. That would be stupid, now wouldn't it?
I have said that overall, it would be beneficial.
Originally posted by dadudemon
You could try to troll less.I never said that it would be perfectly beneficial with no harm. That would be stupid, now wouldn't it?
I have said that overall, it would be beneficial.
could you elaborate on how this is different from me saying you claimed it would be beneficial?
Yes, I could have merely removed your name from the statement at the end, but given how I largely disagree with the claim of benefit (unless, say, we think rearranging the deck chairs to a more aesthetically pleasing set-up on the Titanic is a benefit) I figured I'd just add the edit to clarify that I wasn't saying you were as crazy as Shaky. I may be trolling Shaky, I'm not sure, however, the article is funny in that the ex-oil executives seem to be making the, literal, exact same arguments he is. Is just plain mockery a form of trolling then?
Originally posted by inimalist
could you elaborate on how this is different from me saying you claimed it would be beneficial?
I already answered your question that you are posing, right here. I will not provide anymore. You can google search if you want more if it bothers you that much.
To be more direct, because Ushgarak has told me to be so: I do not wish to discuss that and I feel I have answered your question well-enough already. Use Google search.
Originally posted by inimalist
Is just plain mockery a form of trolling then?
Yes. That's "trolling 101".
Originally posted by dadudemon
I already answered your question that you are posing, right here. I will not provide anymore. You can google search if you want more if it bothers you that much.To be more direct, because Ushgarak has told me to be so: I do not wish to discuss that and I feel I have answered your question well-enough already. Use Google search.
so, just so I'm clear, you think there are benefits that, when weighed against things like "certain catastrophe that is not congruent with global civilization", are worth continuing climate change?
Like, for instance, I know Canada will have a longer period of crop growth if our temperature raised slightly. This, however, is offset by the drought conditions already hitting Africa, America, Asia, etc. Not only that, this benefit is based on temperature stabilizing at just a little hotter, and becomes non-beneficial as soon as it gets hotter than that. Basically, I've seen no benefits that aren't limited to a specific temporal window (that will almost certainly have expired within 100 years) and restricted to a local geographic area.
I haven't seen you answer this, but if your position is "look up my argument for me" I'll just leave it at that.
Originally posted by dadudemon
Yes. That's "trolling 101".
oh, fair enough, then I am happily trolling Shaky and anyone who makes such ludicrous arguments.
Originally posted by inimalist
I haven't seen you answer this, but if your position is "look up my argument for me" I'll just leave it at that.
Actually, we discussed this very topic, in detail, a few years back. This is mostly why I do not wish to entertain it again.
Hmmm...
The conversations are just rehashes of past arguments and I find circular discussion a waste.
So, yes, if you really want to know the benefits of global warming, you can literally google search for it. There's no need for me to do so. You can wade through which ones you find credible and which ones you do not. That's much better than me half-assedly posting a shit link/study or two.
Originally posted by inimalist
oh, fair enough, then I am happily trolling Shaky and anyone who makes such ludicrous arguments.
I believe the keywords you used in your prior post were "mocking". Yes, mocking is trolling and it is one of the most basic kinds of trolling.
Originally posted by dadudemon
Actually, we discussed this very topic, in detail, a few years back. This is mostly why I do not wish to entertain it again.Hmmm...
The conversations are just rehashes of past arguments and I find circular discussion a waste.
So, yes, if you really want to know the benefits of global warming, you can literally google search for it. There's no need for me to do so. You can wade through which ones you find credible and which ones you do not. That's much better than me half-assedly posting a shit link/study or two.
I'm actually not arguing that there aren't benefits, only that, when compared to the negatives, they are extremely limited in location and time. For instance, are you suggesting that there are benefits that will still be a net benefit in 100 years?
I really can't understand why everyone acts like this only matters if global temperatures are affected. Whether that's the case or not we still have circulating gyres of waste in the oceans, we still have chemicals being dumped into waterways and habitats everyday, and we're still adding pollutants into the air that do nothing to improve our health and increase the occurrence of acid rain.
Yes, it's clear global temperatures are rising, but whether that is our fault or not it is clear that as a whole humanity has contributed a relentless flow of synthetic pollution to this planet and continues to do so. Global warming or the lack their of doesn't even matter, but hey, if it gets people talking that's great. Just glad to see that we're able to recycle two-thirds of all the trash in our house.
Originally posted by Ascendancy
I really can't understand why everyone acts like this only matters if global temperatures are affected. Whether that's the case or not we still have circulating gyres of waste in the oceans, we still have chemicals being dumped into waterways and habitats everyday, and we're still adding pollutants into the air that do nothing to improve our health and increase the occurrence of acid rain.Yes, it's clear global temperatures are rising, but whether that is our fault or not it is clear that as a whole humanity has contributed a relentless flow of synthetic pollution to this planet and continues to do so. Global warming or the lack their of doesn't even matter, but hey, if it gets people talking that's great. Just glad to see that we're able to recycle two-thirds of all the trash in our house.
air pollution and acid rain don't pose the existential threats to human existence that climate change does.
This issue is far more important than environmentalism, it is a threat to global security and the human race.
Originally posted by Oliver North
that seems like a fairly fatalistic way to look at things...
Yes, that was the point. You're missing the forest for the trees. Regardless of arguments about what this does to climate in the long run it is destroying the planet; that much is clear. Why it took an argument over climate to get everyone paying attention I don't know.