Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have always been a on the fence person when it comes to global warming. I grew up in the Florida Keys and understand that greater rainfall would occur due to warming. More water vapor this vapor is the big greenhouse gas bar none. Then you have the effect of lowering hurricanes as the north warms faster than south. In reality the purpose of hurricanes is heat transfer.

Many simple observations make me not believe the total global warming deal here. One would argue that it would be required for there to be more water vapor IE: more rainfall, however this is not the case. Australia is drying up, USA is drying up its too widespread to explain to me.

So I came across some videos I found them mighty interesting. Myself I have thought it was global cooling or the precursor to global cooling for quite some time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN06JSi-SW8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCXDISLXTaY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQQGFZHSno

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDX2ExKYyqw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP4mYcrd_18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAUdDLTLXGU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDiJyr0TK6E

Well here is the videos its two 4 part series they are quite long so put some time aside

While I am ambivalent on the subject of the impact of CO2 on climate change the discussions/arguments have positive benefits. Reduction in pollution and the exploration of alternate energy sources are IMHO critical.
You will note (if you watched the first four vids) his disclaimer at the beginning, as a scientist he was only targetting CO2 claims.

Hey no argument on pollution from me at all. I think it should be reduced to as low as possible. Even if that means every car is 100km range being electric. Tough take a train

I hate seeing smog when I go to larger towns. LA makes my eyes and lungs burn that cannot be good. But then again that might be why so many Hollywood actors support GW blindly.

You think LA is bad, you want to have a look at Beijing. The efforts to which the government is going to, to make the city pretty for the games is crazy.
No cars allowed for 3 months or something prior to the games, all production is to stop. Aeroplanes are seeding the sky with silver nitrate I think; in order to make it rain and try to drop the smog from the sky. It;s such a problem there, that where we have the 'nylex clock' in melbourne (a big neon sign shoing the time and temp) in Shanghai and Beijing, they have decibels and percentage smog displays on the buildings!

We who are worried about pollution and are trying to reduce it, don't even know what pollution is. If there were any cities in America or Australia like some of the big asian cities, I think everybody would be trying actively to reduce pollution.

I went to China in 91, and standing on the highest point looking all around, all I could see was high rises. People were poor, generally 1 square metre per person living space. Very few cars. They have found wealth on the back of our consumerist attitudes and the fact that we import as much as we do from them. They can't be blamed for wanting what we have had for decades, but at what cost to themselves? I am sure standing on the same hill now, looking all around would see nothing, just smog.

Sorry KP.... but the "we don't have any bad pollution here" and "pollution is a new thing" kind of arguments make my blood boil.... no offence and it's not about or because of you KP.....

What it's about is the fact that we have wallowed in the squalor of "good times" for so long that we have a generation of people who either have forgotten the awareness, protests and issues of the 70's/80's, don't believe we have a problem, think it's just a new problem, or think that it's some kind of rabid left wing ideological conspiracy to send everyone into poverty.....

Environmental pollution, nuclear power production, nuclear weaponary and other WMD's, the legitimacy of armed force in the invasion of sovereign countries were ALL issues of great interest/debate and sometimes protest and action when I was at high school in NZ 1970-75...

Having moved to Gerringong (about 100km in straight line from Sydney) in 1976 I watched a ever increasing brown smudge on the horizon grow increasingly larger and darker over a decade and the haze that enveloped anyone south of Sydney and Woolongong on a summers day with a northeaster get thicker and more acrid....

Eventually, public protest and EPA monitoring of emmisions from BHP and the introduction of lead free petrol resulted in a MARKED and distinctly noticable decrease in both phenomena.......

Sadly we are now experiencing about the same levels and affects that we did around the 1980's.

The point I'm making is that we have a whole generation of people, industries, governments and a psychie that has effectively forgotten and/or scoffed at the environmental awareness of twenty or thirty years ago.... it became "unpopular" and "derided" as we all sat on the train and read the daily stock market report and attended seminars on how to generate wealth....

Meanwhile industries just totally forgot the agenda, because it wasn't enforced anymore.... state governments and local council planning committes just swept aside environmental concerns in the rush to approve new businesses and/or developments.

California passed a "zero emmision" in 1990, and GM produced the EV1 electric car shortly after.....

Both the zero emmission act and the electric car were killed off by big business, oil lobbies and conservative politicians.....

The result was the "Hummer" for gods sake... and a belief that we all needed to drive 4wd vehicles in major cities...

I am delighted that a renaisance of sorts is occurring, but lament the fact that in our myoptic greed we wasted the twenty/thirty year headstart that we could have had to prevent global warming and the situation that we and our children now face.

Rupert I agree with you. My point is we are worried about the lesser polution we have here. Why aren't they worried in Asia? If we had cities like theirs, our entire populace would be behind the enviro act! I was pointing out the irony? that we are concerned about how smoggy our cities are, when ours are *comparatively* clean. Personally I think Melbourne is too smoggy, if you go out in to the bay and look back, you can see a brown dome covering the city. And Melbourne IS clean, so what effect are the comparatively filthy cities having? I did not mean to say it wasn't an issue. My arguing skills have oft been said to be poor

Agree with you KP.... if only we had continued to clean up our act over the last thirty years then I think that the major third world countries would have also done so... and we would have developed methods and technologies to assist.... so that new economies like China and India would have had both the mindset and the industrial tools to develope their economies cleanly.... or at least a lot more cleanly.....

That's why we should have ratified Kyoto and set and acted to meet targets back in 1990..... but we all know what happened don't we

[quote="RupertofOZ"]Sorry KP.... but the "we don't have any bad pollution here" and "pollution is a new thing" kind of arguments make my blood boil.... no offence and it's not about or because of you KP.....

Rupert! you also could be a wise old ent!

Do they still teach modern history at school?? the industrial revolution? not just the technology but the effect...

with out proper education we are so short lived and fickle we are destined to repeat our past...until we can no longer!

But I hope I am wrong

always wondered why we didn't sign up earlier.................it would have been easier to hold emissions at 1990 levels a bit at a time (from 1997), working out new tech. on the way, rather than regressing them back to 1990 between 2008 and whatever target date they set.

I hope that everybody here is right about the Warming. I truely do not want it to be Cooling but I have to think the devil is in the details. Consider if its cooling the grow periods are going to be shorter and there will be less food and more starvation. Bad scenario way worse than coastal flooding Sydney be dammed but if we don't have food well I am sure you see where I am going.

I hope you all are right but I somehow do not think so. I have been doing research on the younger dryas for my own interests. I was told by a geologist friend of mine to look back at it.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 06_F2.html

HOLY MOLEY!!! has our climate been stable by comparison to that?!?! Thats what worries me to the tenth power. Actually another thing that got my attention. From what I gather the southern hemisphere cooled first.. This is what is happening right now.

In all my history studies I have noticed one thing. History repeats itself. No matter how much some idiot trys to change it, it will repeat. How can we think that we will control the enviroment? Hell the earth had beyond lethal "to humans" 5000ppm CO2 levels in the past without runaway global warming.

Point? Global warming models do not take everything into account. They do not take the carbon sink such as the ocean.. hell they dont even factor in the ocean that is what?!?! 2/3 of the planet surface? It seems that they omit stuff that blows holes in the theory, does anybody remember what theory was? as today it means fact..

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away at one time. Theory was a word meaning best guess till proven right or wrong by scientific fact. Hell we do not even know if gravity is real! It is still a theory as nobody can prove why or how it is... Yet we feel this force everyday and cannot explain it?!?! How do we expect to predict something smaller?

Not to mention how accurate are short term weather forecasts... The NHC that I consider to be one of the most accurate can only go 2 days into the future... How can we expect 100 years??! Go look at the models for 2007 hurricane season and then look at the actual season. Models are helpers not tellers. Holding weight in models is like trying to sell air.

I will stop ranting but wow..

Holey Moley Slicer.... what exactly does that pretty little graph actually represent and/or mean???

As to the slight difference between the two hemispheres, it's pretty easily explained by heat transfer.... very much the same sort of model that occurs annually during the Caribbean hurricane season.... only on a much larger scale... but the principle is the same....

Consider firstly.... the northern hemisphere has a much greater land mass than the southern hemisphere which is almost 2/3 ocean.... almost inversely proportional....

Therefore the two hemispheres have almost diametrically opposed thermal characteristics....

Both hemispheres warming and cooling at the same time would imply global changes caused by rising levels of greenhouse gases. But one hemisphere cooling while the other warmed would suggest simple heat transfer, accomplished by changes in ocean or atmospheric currents.

"You can make the climate cool in certain places just by redistributing the heat through changes in ocean currents, atmospheric circulation or both,” said Lynch-Stieglitz. “The most fully developed theory to account for these rapid climate changes is that they do represent changes in the transport of heat into the North Atlantic by what we call overturning circulation of the ocean.”

In that scenario, warm water flows northward from the Southern Hemisphere into the North Atlantic, where it gives up its heat. Being denser, the cooled water then sinks and flows back south. The scenario accounts for both heating in the north and cooling in the south.

As I said.... you see exactly this effect every year in the Gulf and up the Atlantic seaboard with the Gulf and Atlantic currents which circulate vast amounts of heated ocean water from Sth America all the way past Greenland and curving back down past Europe and eventually returning toward Sth America pretty much along the equator.....

The effect of these currents is not only seen in the Caribbean and Southern states of the US, but in extreme snow and flood patterns throughout Western Europe

Similar circulatory currents flow up the Western coast of Sth America past Chile and Peru and across the equator and down the east coast of Australia..... these give rise to what we know and measure as the "El Nino", "El Nina" and the "Southern Ocean Oscillation Index".....

The ability of these current to dramatically affect the climate on both sides of the ocean and indeed both hemispheres in almost opposite affects is widely demonstrated.....

No rocket science required I reckon..... simple heat exchange.... Mother Nature "Ghia" working its inherent desire to "balance".....

Just that there seems to be an overwealming amount of evidence to suggest that mankinds negative influence and input to the normal scheme of things may have stressed the natural ability to correct and balance beyond a point we we may be able to survive in the fashion that we have up to now.

The graph shows the massive swings in climate at those times compared to the "modern times" Yeah... Kinda makes the hockey stick seem like bullshit eh? Btw thats SST's as in sea surface temps.

As for heat transfer no argument there from me. The heat transfer is a incredible mechanism for controlling the enviroment we live in. However one must also understand currents migrate and move based on continental drift "that was a theory not to long ago and thrashed many reputations in science" Consider before panama joined there was no Atlantic current as we know them today. There has been measurements for the north Atlantic current to be slowing down year after year by measurable amounts. Sure this could be due to Greenland melting

But lets talk ABRUPT climate change that will fry everything as we know it. Amazon Jungle, It has been in drought for 2 years going on 3 if continued. Over 50% of the forest has been whacked down. If there is another drought this year then say bye bye Amazon. If this is to occur then.. Hello CO2 in MASSIVE amounts to the tune of double the rates measured today. If this in turn heats the northern latitudes then we are baked... Siberian permafrost melts releasing methane in turn heating the oceans and causes massive shifts in the ocean to release methane. Yes this is all theory go look its crazy frightening.

You want to talk serious global warming and the implications. Do not rule out MASSIVE dieoff events. I like to be optimistic and look at cooling and hope mate.

And as for the overwhelming evidence. I have yet to see it.. Maybe once its based on sound science and not hackery. I mean look at the recent discovery that NASA made errors in their temp database. Placing hotter years in the 30's

Enjoy?
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articl ... 414B7F0000
http://environment.newscientist.com/art ... 4.500.html
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0811-amazon.html

Can we pile anything else ontop? How about a Supervolcano eruption.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 141612.htm

Alright I am done for now LOL sorry if I ruined some peoples day. But I can pile doom ontop of doom But this is what creates funding I guess eh?

Btw I just want to reply to myself here. I am in no way a qualified scientist. And my thoughts are kinda different sometimes don't take anything personal

many years ago when I was at uni one of my lecturers spoke about cooling and what it would take to send us off into another iceage. Two cold summers in Alaska/Canada. By 'cold summers' I mean, two summers in a row where the surface ice does not melt. This increases the albedo, reflectivity, of Terra and the warmth from Sol can't warm us up enough and the planet cools. After two years of this, so the theory goes, Terra would continue to cool until we got to an iceage.