Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

How are you educating your daughter (in the home) to conserve by giving her a truck that gets 12 mpg?

Again, what is the price point where she simply can not afford to drive that truck?

Let me flip it around and tell you my price point.

It was around $2.75/gallon. My husband was driving his Dodge ram about 80 miles round trip to work. Gets about 11 mpg. Thats about 1600 miles per month. 145 gallons/month. $400 per month on gas.
Car payment on a new honda? $305. Gas for honda? $85/month. And guess what? This month is our last car payment.

And we are not talking about whether nature will survive. We are talking about whether

1) we are affecting the world's climate,
2) we should mitigate our impact through personal or group actions,
3) we would enjoy living in or even survive in a world where "nature has adapted" to our current and projected actions.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that we want this place to remain pleasant and might as well reduce usage of resources if it will save money as well. Folks have demonstrated this with houses that are cheaper to build, more pleasant to live in, and use a quarter of the energy to heat and cool; cars that are cheaper to build, safer to drive, give you more range than current cars, and run on electricity....and can be built now. It "just" takes thinking about the whole dang system instead of the piecemeal approach we have now. It also take adjusting incentives so the designer of a house, for example, is paid for the performance of the design rather than the square footage.

I'm certainly not claiming that our completely broken state government is a good model. But in terms of energy use, my understanding is that, at least before the recent economic downturn, California's energy use per capita was remaining flat or decreasing even while our economy was expanding. California has some distinct advantages in terms of climate, but it's still one of the most energy efficient states in the country. I think NY is more efficient, probably because so much of the population is in large urban areas. And perhaps you can explain why the population of CA is increasing whilst at the same time "people are leaving in droves".

OK, let's tackle biodiversity first. Current rates of extinction are roughly 45x the background rate, which is comparable to past major extinctions. It's difficult to assess extinction rates because for some of the most diverse parts of the world we don't really know how many species there are, but we can use well known groups (like birds) as a proxy. Habitat loss is primarily to blame. You can read more here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/libra ... 32_04.html


Happy to - greater density of leaves on trees, more algae in the ocean which is where 60+% of our oxygen supply comes from anyway. It's a natural sequence - warmer ocean temps promotes more algae growth - it's how nature has coped in the past and will continue to do so. When the temp starts to cool off again, the algae dies off - nature adjusts.[/quote]

Two problems with your examples. Algae growth in the ocean is limited by nutrients rather than CO2. That's why people are talking about ocean fertilization as a way of geoengineering our way out of climate change. The problem is that most of the carbon fixed by the algae ends up back in the atmosphere because they get eaten before the algae can sink to the bottom, carrying their carbon with them.
Trees also don't respond to increased CO2 in a linear way, because again, they're rarely limited by CO2. In fact, for many plants, CO2 fixation is limited at higher temperatures.

"Nature" is currently "coping" - ocean acidification is a great example. The oceans absorb CO2, lowering pH. Over geologic time, that extra carbon will end up in ocean sediments. Over the short term, it will kill corals and other organisms that can't extract carbonate from the water at low pH. The question is whether you want to live in the environment that results from increased CO2.

And turning CO2 concentrations into absolute versus relative numbers doesn't diminish the argument that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is changing very quickly relative to historical changes. As a geologist you're probably familiar with the fact that the Permian extinctions were associated with rapid increases in CO2.

Madrone26 how do you personally determine that CO2 is the precursor to rising temperatures and not the consequence?

Novaris,

I've got to stick my oar in here...

If we accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, then increasing or decreasing it will change climate in various ways and to various degrees in various locations. Some effects will probably be beneficial, some negligible, some problematic. But until we run this experiment on the only home we have, we have no way to be *certain* of the degree, location, or nature of the effects.

It may be that CO2 (and methane) will increase due to the effects of warming, a far more frightening effect similar to some children removing some soil beside a giant boulder that then moves slightly and begins rolling uncontrollably down a mountain. We may only see the small movement possible directly from our actions and not realize the slope we live on.

Even if I am wrong, efficiency is cheaper than oil/gas/coal, produces lots more jobs, and is less liable to produce problems. The only trouble with efficiency is that we effectively buy our energy on credit: rather than paying more up front and paying much less in the years that follow, we go cheap and pay far more in total over our years of wasting and polluting.

And I'm as guilty as anyone....but I'm trying....

This is a really good question. First of all, I'm not a climate scientist, I'm a biology with interests in systematics and evolutions, so I'm not personally determining anything. But, I think the published evidence supports my opinion that climate change is real, and scarier than most people are willing to accept.

Here's a link to a very good discussion about the correlation between CO2 and past temps. Summary is: we have good evidence from a variety of sources that indicate that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is another force acting on global temperature and climate.
http://www.grist.org/article/historical ... re-change/

One of the examples is the extinction of the dinosaurs, which is associated with massive temperature change following the eruption of the Deccan Traps. Deccan Traps = massive amounts of lava and CO2 = increase in temp.

And here is a more technical discussion of the correlation between CO2 and temperature from ice cores:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... p-and-co2/

Just to stir the pot a little bit and play devils advocate,

dose change (including climate change )always have to be a bad thing ?
yes, some things will become extinct but others will take there place, the world is not necessarily a worse place because the dinosaurs are no longer here. It was though these major changes over time that made us what we are today,

maybe its part of a much larger cycle to remove the dominant species and let others have a go at climbing to the top ?

Are you trying to imply that there's some sort of mystical force governing which species are dominant? Yeah - species come and go, but I can't think of a good example of another species conducting self-extermination.

I don't have kids, so I don't have a personally vested interest here. I do have a great deal of empathy for all the folks living in low-lying areas of the planet that are going to loose their homes. And I hate to see so many things go extinct as a consequence of our desires for new gadgets.

Umm yes - there is a mystical force! It is up to you as to what your heart tells you of He exists or not.

As a geologist I can say that, by far, the largest contributor to the death of the dinosaurs was the meteoric impact (likely multiple)s that created the K-T boundary, corresponding to the deaths of the dinaosaurs which occurred very rapidly around the globe (i.e. over a few thousand years).


The trouble with the ice cores as that they only go back a statistically insignificant amount of time and don't really give us any insight into what really are high levels of CO2 and what aren't.

See here is the problem from the suggested reference:
That section leads me to understand CO2 has not caused global warming. My issues with the current debate and political trend is that warming may well be happening and may well prove to be a problem. However concentrating on CO2 diverts resources from other areas for instance I tend to think that disruption to the small water cycle from deforestation is a more urgent issue yet it is generally ignored (probably because it's even more difficult to change our ways and harder to make a market in)
viewtopic.php?f=31&t=5218
The thing is if we stopped population growth and all reduced waste, repaired, reused and recycled, conserved water, stopped deforestation and improved energy efficiency CO2 would take care of itself. But most will pay a bit more for their carbon credit and go on consuming and behaving in exactly the same way they do now.

That's true, and that's when you need to look at other sources of evidence. What the ice cores give us is evidence to test models of the degree of forcing caused by atmospheric CO2. In other words, it's pretty clear that the regular ice ages are precipitated by changes in solar output, but the change is magnified by changes in CO2. In other words, the ice core record gives us data to figure out the sensitivity of the climate to changes in CO2.

Of course, the further back in time you go, the more uncertain the analysis. But it's clear that the climate has been much warmer in the past - fossil plants in Antarctica and all. That's not a good argument against modern anthropogenic climate change in my book. What it tells us that that climate on the planet responds to changes in solar intensity and concentrations of greenhouse gases.

See here is the problem from the suggested reference:
That section leads me to understand CO2 has not caused global warming. My issues with the current debate and political trend is that warming may well be happening and may well prove to be a problem. However concentrating on CO2 diverts resources from other areas for instance I tend to think that disruption to the small water cycle from deforestation is a more urgent issue yet it is generally ignored (probably because it's even more difficult to change our ways and harder to make a market in)
http://backyardaquaponics.com/forum/vie ... =31&t=5218
The thing is if we stopped population growth and all reduced waste, repaired, reused and recycled, conserved water, stopped deforestation and improved energy efficiency CO2 would take care of itself. But most will pay a bit more for their carbon credit and go on consuming and behaving in exactly the same way they do now.[/quote]

I totally agree that there are other pressing environmental issues that have a more direct impact on human health and global biodiversity. The thing about climate change for me is the degree of expected impact, and the sense that if we cross a tipping point, we're going to live with a much warmer planet for a long time, which will exacerbate issues of water and available land for agriculture.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say the article suggests CO2 has not caused global warming. The ice ages were not initiated by changes in CO2, but that doesn't mean that CO2 has no impact. I'll give you an analogy. If you develop a clog in your growbed drain such that the flow of water out of the GB is reduced, the bed will overflow. In this scenario, the clog "caused" the overflow. But the amount of water you loose is dependent on the pump pressure and timing.

Climate is nothing if not complex.