The Huffington Post reports:
The annual National Clean Energy Summit on Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada, pointed up the promise and pitfalls of such events…
Schwarzenegger got off some good gibes to win the crowd over.
Speaking of greenhouse gas deniers: “Strap some conservative-thinking people to a tailpipe for an hour and then they will agree it’s a pollutant!
Sounds like supposition to me.
A major component of acid rain
found in every cancer
contact can cause acute problems or death. The long term prognosis of any contact is death.
http://www.dhmo.org/
Howdy EricM
That’s a reasonable summary of the CO2-warming hypothesis. It goes back as far as 1938, according to a posting here, and it became prominent around 1985. James Hansen gave his clarion call to Congress in 1988.
The idea was worth investigating. Upon investigation and 25 years of observations later, here’s what we have:
1. Human production of CO2 in industrial activity is a very small part of the CO2 production. Although the numbers sound large in isolation, when you supply the divisor [(human production)/(all production)], you get a small number after all.
2. In the atmosphere, CO2 is a weak warming forcing. The strongest forcing is from oxidized hydrogen.
3. Actually, the strongest forcing is just having an atmosphere to retain heat.
4. CO2’s influence is logarithmic, not arithmetic. Each increment of CO2 is far less of a forcing than the increment that went before it.
5. Empirical observation shows that temperatures seemed to rise, then stabilized or even retreated, all while atmospheric CO2 was rising and while human production of CO2 was rising. CO2 is clearly being overwhelmed by other forcings or influences.
None of that is in dispute, although the significance of it is subject to debate.
Now some special reasons for doubting the AGW concept.
1. Data has been withheld, cherry-picked, and adjusted with no coherent explanation for the adjustments.
2. The historical record for temperatures is very weak. It’s short and the methods and instruments have been inconsistent among reporting stations and, over time, at the same stations. We’re comparing Fiji apples to Golden apples to Red Delicious apples. That might be okay except that, statistically, you aren’t supposed to assume as much as the AGW gang assume.
3. The AGW theory has been politicized and mostly by charlatans at that. Al Gore’s “documentary” is a tissue of fabrications and errors; even a UK court acknowledged that. The socialists-pretending-to-be-environmentalists see it as an opportunity to shaft the wealthy. The Luddites see it as their great chance to stop technology. “You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses…and the pig got up and slowly walked away.”
I’m a little tree-huggy myself. At least as it’s going on now, AGW/Climate Change is not tree-huggy, it’s rife with fraud and wicked intent.
regarding the calculations and comments about human, animal, and other natural CO2 emissions:
given a natural ecosystem, these emissions would fall into balance with the rest of the system. total output = total input. when considering the CO2 released by industrial activity this is not the fact. total output of CO2 is far above that sequestered by natural or any other means. add to that the negative impacts upon the ability of the ecosystem to sequester CO2 by human activity such as deforestation, and we find that CO2 output becomes a real problem.
Oh, do you mean dihydrogen monoxide – you know, water? I have fun with that all the time.
Howdy Mitchell Ivey
Yes, but some people know that name, so I went with a variant. It’s also been called dihydrogen monoxide.
Environmentalists have had, for as long as I can remember, a distinct penchant for two things…first “improving the truth” which in an earlier age would have been called “lying” and second accusing their detractors of doing what they themselves are doing. They also like to think that only scientists who are financed by liberal “funds” can not be influenced by the desire for “money”.
One other thing, when someone mentions “consensus” and “science” in the same breath, they are talking about the new definition of Political Science – not science. Real science, in fact hates consensus, real science goes where the the experiment takes it, not where 40 other scientists say it should go. Those who follow the 40 are not scientists, they are charlitans trying to bilk someone out of funding for their hobby.
We always call it dihydrogen oxide
Yup.
You mean one atom of oxygen, not molecule. One atom of oxygen is the difference between molecular oxygen and ozone or water and hydrogen peroxide. One atom of sodium is the difference between chlorine and table salt. The properties of a molecule are generally very different from the properties of the constituent elements and one atom, or even the arrangement of the atoms, can yield a completely different compound. For instance, the difference between a tox gas that interferes with hemoglobin and a perfectly harmless gas that we exhale.
Water huh?
Howdy Mitchell
If you’re interested in oxidized hydrogen, here are a few facts:
Most oxidized hydrogen is found in nature.
Humans can release elemental hydrogen from oxidized hydrogen, but almost no capitalists will produce much elemental hydrogen because it is costly. The very few who produce elemental hydrogen do so to make a profit.
Oxidized hydrogen is released in many human activities, especially industrial activities. It is sometimes mistaken for smoke or soot.
Oxidized hydrogen is a major greenhouse forcing, in fact it’s the most important greenhouse forcing.
Oxidized hydrogen is found in cancerous tissues and in HIV-positive human serum.
Oxidized hydrogen is part of all commercially-prepared vaccines, even oral ones, and some celebrities believe the vaccines are linked to developmental disorders.
Oxidized hydrogen is a powerful solvent. In granular form, oxidized hydrogen is implicated in many vehicle accidents, some of which involve fatalities.
Oxidized hydrogen has been found in natural and in man-made bodies of water.
There’s so much more…
Howdy John
Perhaps that explains why my glass of H2O was so very fizzy and tasted bad…
Howdy Mitchell
Your math was good enough for warmists but I knew you’d rather have your numbers straight. Your key point was valid: living creatures produce quite a lot of CO2 by warmist standards and natural processes account for most CO2, not human technological activity.
It may comfort you to know that you do not toot. The bacteria in your colon toot and you, of course, have to recycle the sequestered product of their tooting. But you don’t produce the gas.
I’m interested.
Thank you, I was running through the numbers pretty fast. I divided the 7 trillion pounds by 2 instead of 2000. Still 3.5 billion tons just breathing and that doesn’t include the animal life breathing and the termites farting.
I’m thinking about launching a public information campagin about oxidized hydrogen and seeing how people respond.
Howdy Mitchell
Speaking of yes, misplaced decimals:
If each person produces 1000 lbs of CO2 per year, and there are 7b of us give or take, we produce 7T POUNDS, not 3.5T TONS. More like 3.5b tons than 3.5t tons.
By your calculations, then, humans produce almost as much CO2 as cars do, which could easily be true. Human production of CO2 by industrial means (as opposed to just breathing) is a small part of the planet’s CO2 production.
Mitchel beat me to the calculations of CO2 produced by humans….but he forgot to include the CO2 produced by ALL mammals…. wildlife type
the perspective of relative input suggests a more appropriatae level of impact. Warmists are chasing windmills and are too stupid to know it. The general population (including der Arny) is incredibly ignorant and uniformed…. unfortunately.
The people who thought this was a good quip are the same ones who think they are restoring ‘science’ to the White House.
Right. If you start your car, run a hose from the tailpipe into the car and sit in there until you die, the coroner will describe it as “carbon monoxide poisoning”. There is a difference between the two – one molecule of oxygen.
Carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, makes no difference when you’re saving the planet, right? Hell, I guess it doesn’t matter, the people he’s connecting with won’t know the difference anyway.
True cars do pollute. There are James Bond wannabes all over Houston with their smoke screens driving around the loop. But…by EPA standards there are 7.104 billion unlicensed polluters running around this plant spewing out 4% CO2 12 to 25 times per minute. That averages out to 1000 pounds per year or 3.5 trillion tons again on average. Cars produce about 4.1 billion tons. US and China coal plants produce 5.4 billion tons per year and that is about 30% of the world discharge. Again these numbers seem to point in a direction, but please correct my math if I displaced a decimal point. The problem isn’t cars or coal or gas and diesel. It’s people. There are too many.
So that’s his justification for strapping me to a turbine and making me pay for it. I think he’s still smoking a lot of that California medicine.
Ahnd wen Ahnuld came fum Autchia, he fogot to bhing any ahhhs.
It seems the EPA disagrees with Ahnold. Don’t those very experiments going on right now? (with diesel exhaust) Didn’t Steve Milloy try to get them to stop?
Guess who was the first civilian to own a Hummer? Purchased it from AM General for a buck. Ahnold
His brain has long been addled by steroid use … like the “terminator” he is just programmed to regurgitate what he has been programmed with. Arnie, as a person of Austrian heritage, I find you an embarrassment to us.
Arnie’s brain is blurred by all the anabolic steroids he took while bodybuilding.
Hey Arnie, Wie geht es dir, du alter idiot? Let’s strap you to a chambermaid and see if you can …
American citizen Stuart Angel is not around to explain what it feels like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Angel#Forced_disappearance_of_Stuart_Angel
A German wanting to gas people!
Honestly is he THAT STUPID.
I could have said more, but this is a family show and I didn’t want to utter anything that might lead to litigation. But, hell, what a despicable thing the Schwarzenigger says.
Strap Schwarzenegger to an abacus, and see him become confused.
And to think we once mistook him for a conservative.
It’s quite possible that Schwarzenegger and others do confuse the real pollution from car exhaust with CO2. All the more since alarmists love to blur the distinction between soot, smoke, steam and CO2.