- Seven answers to climate contrarian nonsense.
- Denver voters will be asked to create an UFO commission. (From Mikey V.)
- Resonating feathers produce courtship song in rare bird: “We normally don’t think of sexual selection transforming areas of critical importance.” (From Steve.)
- The ecological consequences of vampirism.
I bookmarked the climatology page. I doubt it will convince contrarians, but it will prove helpful.
As for the UFO thing, sometimes I hate the referendum. But that aside, I hope that Colorado voters do the right thing.
If we discount all the wingnuttery, the first paragraph of that climate article is the only one that matters:
“The chemist Svante Arrhenius went further in 1896 by estimating the impact of CO2 on the climate; after painstaking hand calculations he concluded that doubling its concentration might cause almost 6 degrees Celsius of warming—an answer not much out of line with recent, far more rigorous computations.”
Sadly, there’s no link to any of these rigourous computations.
Can anyone come up with an actual *experiment* do show what happens with CO2 in the atmosphere? Otherwise we’re still just tracking hypothetical correlations.
Ugh, the comments on the climatology page were so full of stupid. Agree on the UFO thing – what a waste of time and resources.
re: ecological impact of vampirism: So freaking tired of Twilight. But, it is awesome that 90%+ of the attention that tripe is getting is to make fun of it (special thank you shout out to our wonderful Masala_Skeptic!)
I think there might actually be a lot of people who still think the internal debate among climate scientists is still about global warming being a fact.
If I understand correctly, the internal debate is about whether global warming is being caused by humans or not.
Erring on the side of caution, I’d say it’s better to look for more efficient use of our resources anyway (it’ll benefit us either way), rather than do nothing until the proof is in and it’s too late to make a difference.
But some people don’t want to give up the easy life yet …
@exarch:
I was under the impression that the controversy was the extent and direction of feedbacks in the system. Since the output of climate models is highly sensitive to these feedbacks, this is a good thing to sort out.
@davehodg:
“Can anyone come up with an actual *experiment* do show what happens with CO2 in the atmosphere? Otherwise we’re still just tracking hypothetical correlations.”
Maybe… venus? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus
There have been many: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
The problem is asking how important that is when it’s part of the huge stew that is Earth’s atmosphere.
@sporefrog Looking at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Global_warming_potential
Isn’t CO2 the least of our worries?
Maybe starting with not chopping down forests and planting them with methane-producing cows would be a good start.
There’s audio of the resonant feather bird on the 11/14 episode of Quirks and Quarks. Really strange adaptation.