/sci/ - Science & Math

Greenhouse gases?

It doesn't.....

Certain gasses/ pollution called "greenhouse" gasses because they produce an effect similar to how a greenhouse works.

The sunlight passes into the earths atmosphere and when the light bounces off instead of returning back into space it hits those gasses and is reflected back down to earth. So the light get traped into the earth, warming up the planet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Some guy was telling me that it was hotter in the medieval times, and that the warming correlates to solar activity. Is he full retard?

>>4259157
Its possible the earth does have cycles of warm and cold periods.

>>4259157

Not as such. There was a period in medieval times where is was significantly warmer. We're talking wine in England warmer. Similarly there was a period known as the little ice age. And of course the solar activity has an influence on the temperature of the earth. That's not the point.

The point is that if humanity has a significant effect on the climate then we should make an effort to ensure that no catastrophes arise from this influence.

Bunch of scientists realise they can get funding if they say a disaster is about to happen but they can stop it. More join in. Anyone who dissents is ridiculed and ostracized. Left wingers whose authorotarian ideologies were rejected after the fall of the Berlin wall spot an opportunity to discredit capitalism and increase government control over our lives. Then you have the hippies who replaced their religion with a green one, wanting to revert goddess mother earth to her virginal pre-human stage. Government session an opportunity to gain more power while looking good and businesses spot an opportunity to make money by selling us useless technologies like wind power, subsidized by our taxes of course.

Eventually the whole thing becomes Gospel, a new religion is formed and anyone who speaks against it is a heretic. Note the use of language. Global warming deniar = holocaust semiarid.

>>4259185

Holocaust deniar even.

>>4259157
There are various natural cycles that change the earths climate, axil tilt, amplitude of the earths orbit etc, over periods from 10000-100000 years. Other stuff gives large variation over decades, La Nina/Le Nino events, southern ocean oscilations etc. The general trend over the last years show a dynamic system responding to natural climate forcings but keeping to a fairly stable level. Its over the last 150 years that there has been a increase in temperatre that isn't explained by natural climate forcings and seems to be related to an increase in GHG's.

>>4259185
Would be nice. During all your bawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwing, no climatologist is getting any more money than they did previously.

Fuck you and your lying arse.

>>4259195

/pol/ is one board over

>>4259204

They get tenure, departments get more funding, new 'climate research' departments are opened. Besides, many of the people claiming this shit to be treatment aren't even scientists, they're activists of one form or another.

>>4259211
>>4259211

Claiming this to be true.

>>4259195
So where is the evidence that lets us differentiate between natural climate change and human climate change?
I mean evidence that a laymen can understand.

>>4259207
How's that a political statement?

>>4259212
No.

No matter how much your biasedly-paranoid mind likes to think that scientists are concocting a conspiracy instead of facing actual facts.

>>4259259
>>4259259

Because climate science isn't a real science at all, it's a political science.

http://www.financialpost.com/news/IPCC+activist+experts/5600581/story.html

How did this get so fucking political?

OP here, I refrained from posting this thread in /pol/ because I knew if would be herp derp trolls trolling trolls.
I'm just looking for a simple explanation.
What is the most simple piece of irrefutable evidence that suggests WE are heating this planet up?

>>4259269
>Donna LaFramboise
Sure is impartial writing.
She's using mostly the same false arguments as any other political hack. I wonder if she gets paid to do it too, or if she's just so deluded that she does it for free.

>>4259274
Because politics is the biggest gun in the arsenal of big money to fight against knowledge.

>>4259275
>simple
That's the problem. Everyman McJohnQPublic wants simple answers, but the climate is an extremely complex system to understand.

>>4259275
> simple
> irrefutable

Science doesn't work like that, son.

>>4259284
OK, then give me the complex answer (or point me in the right direction).

I don't care, as long as it is completely objective, and there's no other reasonable possibility of causation.

Evolution is reasonably complex, but you can still get your point across to detractors and laymen.

>>4259294
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_balog_time_lapse_proof_of_extreme_ice_loss.html

>>4259294
The whole topic is kind of ...funny.

I hope I summarize it in an adequate fashion, if I fail at this please, anyone, provide a fine rebuttal here.

Afaik, humanity assumed for a long time that we had no effect on climate whatsoever - therefore we burned anything anywhere however it was convenient for "us".

At some point in time, the hypothesis that "we" have influence on climate arose (because obviously climate changed). The debate about greenhouse effect and stuff came up. I don't know if this was proven or not.

Recently(?), another bunch of people looked into earth's geological history and realized that climate changed EVEN MORE drastically (ice ages), providing a new funny scope on the matter.

IF you really want concrete facts, I can only recommend to directly ask institutes that look into these things, and do not ask sci - we can only restate what we got from various sources (with the exception of the hands on scientists). With the political shit-storm at hand, I assume that we cannot tell you anything that's "proven".

>>4259313
>>4259294
The big problem really isn't that the climate is changing or the change in temperature.

The actual problem is that the rate of change is orders of magnitude higher than anything normal in the history of the planet that we have discovered.

The only other times when the climate and temperatures have changed as fast as they are now, were during the great extinction events of the past.

Some people like to think that this change will not be a problem, or that it will be beneficial.
And it would be, if humans weren't still very much dependent on a whole lot of species interdependence for our survival.

Slow change is all well and good, keeping the pressure on. But fast change puts species in a vice and squeezes, and we have already put several biomes under more stress than they have been able to handle.

Because the climate is a chaotic system, there will never be an exact, down to the very core answer regarding it. You can only take notes on changes and hopefully correctly link it to an event, and most changes depend on more factors than we can currently reasonably record.

So basically climate change requires a degree of "belief". What I find especially ironic is that the ones who deny climate change are typically in the conservative camp, and they are quite often religious, arguing that you should believe in god without due evidence. At the same time believing in climate change based on the available evidence is still considered by them a "political thing".

>>4259325
I don't think any sane person believes that a change in temperature would not have adverse effects on the Earth as we know it.
The question is whether the information we have acquired in regards to the current rise in temperature can directly attributed to human activities.
As of yet I haven't seen that evidence.

AS far as I understand it, there's a natural warming/cooling cycle, and the only threat of Global Warming is that humanity is adding too much insulation during the early part of the Warming cycle, so now the planet will heat up faster, and too a higher tempurature which could be deadly to many things in the world as far as ambient temperature goes.
Antarctica melting and flooding is not a real issue. That will happen slow.

>>4259358
The huge rate of change correlated with the rate of release of greenhouse gases by humans is some good evidence.

>>4259362
Except that the Earth is supposed to be in a cooling part of the cycle, not in a warming one. The warming part of the cycle ended thousands of years ago. So no, the natural cycle does NOT explain the warming. And it expressly does NOT explain how the Earth is warming up about a hundred times faster than it would even IF it were in a warming part of the cycle.

>>4259257
this
this right here
is what i'm interested in

daily CO2 expulsion by the oceans as they heat up, plus the MASSIVE levels of co2 just pumping out of hundreds of active or semi-active volcanos worldwide plus who knows what else

We have a Carbon tax now in Australia....

>>4259375
We have that in Canada. I get $500 from the government every year because low income people need help paying for gas on account of it; except I ride a bike lol.

If one really wishes to understand any subject as wide as Climate Change then off to the library you go! Read several books and see how these scientists come up with their answers. They put some 8 hours a day into this subject and you're expecting to understand it with some comments made here? Everything that's simplified or made easier for the practical man is essentially wrong or gives you a shallow picture of the matter. Never ask for a one fact that proves something, it's always much more complicated than that and you should know it.

Best part of science is that you have to be always reading and learning. What you read about climate change last year may not be relevant anymore and you migt have completely wrong picture about some things.

>>4259393
Canada is fucking hypocritical.
Extracting tons of oil through oil sands, the most polluting method, and then making a carbon tax. A joke.

I can't believe there are still anthropocentric climate change deniars in fucking /sci/.

The actual scientists' report: ipcc.ch

>>4259375
HA HA
sucks to be you ausfailia.

>>4259401
>>4259401
>I can't believe there are still anthropocentric climate change deniars in fucking /sci/.

I can't believe there are global warming believers on this board.

>ipcc.ch
HAHA okay. You realize they were blatantly lying right?

Nobody cares about your shitty mother earth religion.

>>4259401
Fuck I keep confusing "anthropogenic" and "anthropocentric".

Should ead "anthropogenic climate change".

>>4259401
>>4259401
>Extracting tons of oil through oil sands, the most polluting method, and then making a carbon tax. A joke.

This is why I love being a superior canadian, enjoy your lack of oil you self hating piece of shit.

>>4259411
>siding with people who use political hacks instead of science
No, Johnny, you are the idiots. And then Johnny was a sea cucumber.

>>4259419
>siding with people who use political hacks instead of science
This is precisely what you are doing.
It's kind of cute that you're so brainwashed and suck authoritarian cock.

>>4259421
Your posts would carry more weight if you stopped lying.
Then again, you wouldn't have anything to say about the topic if you did.

>>4259426
>lying

lol how am I lying? You leftists are the ones that come up with the craziest shit and force everyone to believe it.

>>4259401
>I can't believe there are still anthropocentric climate change deniars in fucking /sci/.
I'm not really in denial, just a sort of suspended belief, at least compared to the general public.

If you ever had a group of people believing things for the wrong reason, then I think this is the best example. Climate change has definitely been the most hyperbolized scientific theory ever touched by media and the unscientific community I've ever seen.
No wonder people are calling it a political science.

And then there are people on here saying "It's too complex" or "Go to the library". I've never seen that rhetoric applied to other scientific theories online (at least not at the basic level).

There's usually a level of transparency we can reach with these complex sciences, but not with climate change. It's always a clusterfuck of political and economic ideas, compounded by conspiracy theories and pseudoscience.

FACT: Even if global warming is happening it wouldn't do much damage.

These are facts.

>>4259428
See, there you go again.
There are republican climatologists who agree that climate change is happening, that it is anthropogenic and that it is becoming a huge problem.

And not just the scientists. It's becoming so that only tea party faggots have a problem there. Well, tea party and the presidential candidates, who've gone head over heels to rescind their former views that climate change is bad and something ought to be done about it.

>>4259429
Here's a good statistic you should use when deciding whether climate change is happening and if it's bad: 99% of climatologists and other applicable scientists say it it s so.
On the other side are people like Lord Monckton, who is, and I'm not kidding here, an actual snake-oil salesman, let alone a liar, and I have the House of Lords' word on him being a liar.
http://noblesseoblige.org/2010/04/17/lord-monckton-and-snake-oil/

>WE NEED A CARBON TAX, LETS DEINDUSTRIALIZE THE NATIONS OF THE EARTH, LETS KILL COUNTLESS AMOUNTS OF PEOPLE

This is why scientists hate you environmentalists. Your entire ideology is based off envy, not science.

>>4259483
>>4259483
>scientists hate you environmentalists
>environmentalists

You're from america, right?

>>4259468
>99% of climatologists and other applicable scientists say it is so
OK excellent. But what are those scientists saying in regards to my questions?
If there is a massive consensus as you say, there should be countless amounts of empirical peer-reviewed studies thus conclusive evidence.

>>4259504
>there should be countless amounts of empirical peer-reviewed studies thus conclusive evidence.

And there is, it's just that fucktards like you look at the evidence and conclude that this doesn't prove, or is insufficient evidence.

Confirmation bias, look it up.

>>4259503
You're from europe right?

Seriously though enjoy your religion ecofag.

>>4259507
I think its more about personal political agendas than mental failures. These people often tend to understand the data. Search for "Green Dragon" on youtube and you'll see how insidious creationists can be. It's not illegal to be anti-science after all.

>it's just that fucktards like you look at the evidence and conclude that this doesn't prove, or is insufficient evidence.

Exactly what these environmentalists are doing.

>>4259509
Tell me, can you calculate the temperature on mars? If I say it's 4 times closer to sun and has albedo of 0.7. I'm assuming you're aware of the solar constant.

>>4259511
The environmentalists (the unreasonable ones at least) blow the evidence out of proportion though, instead of out-right denial.

Also, I'd recommend skepticalscience.com to anyone wanting information regarding climate change.
It's a pretty good website to find information regarding climate science. The articles all have sources from peer-reviewed scientific papers.

>>4259528
I visit website and this is the first thing i see

>As a Christian, we're told that God is not the author of fear. God is love

>scientific..

>>4259532
You scrolled down a fair amount then, and read a citation from Katharine Hayhoes (lol..hey ho's....)
NOT an excerpt from the site's articles.

Don't try to discredit it by cherry picking a quote people will think to believe that the person who runs this site is some kind of christian nutter.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-advanced.htm

Read this instead.

>>4259532
You also failed to cite the rest of that entry.

"Further insight into what drives Katharine can be found in the following video where she discusses the Christian response to climate change.
A core Christian value is a heart for the poor and vulnerable. Katharine provides one of the more concise and compelling summaries of why
climate change is an important issue for Christians. Here's an excerpt:

As a Christian, we're told that God is not the author of fear. God is love. When we're acting
out of fear, we're thinking about ourselves. When we act about love, we're not thinking about ourselves. We're thinking about others.
Our global neighbours, the poor and disadvantaged, the people who don't have the resources to adapt.
So I believe we're called first of all to love each other and second of all, to act. "


OH GOD THAT'S SO HORRIBLE, SHE'S TRYING TO GET THE CHRISTIANS WHO OPPOSE CLIMATE CHANGE
AS IF IT'S SOME KIND OF PLOT OF SATAN TO GET INVOLVED AND EDUCATE THEMSELVES.

ITT: HURR DURR THERE'S SO MUCH EVIDENCE OUT THERE YOU ARE JUST IN DENIAL!
>Not posting evidence

>>4259619
>being a lazy fuck and expecting evidence to be presented every time instead of searching for it yourself
ITT: HURR DURR THERE'S NO EVIDENCE

>The sun burns a little hotter, solar flares come our direction
>This heat causes more water vapor and C02 to enter the atmosphe
>The water vapor locks heat in
>The heat creates more water vapor

>>4259741
>thinking that solar radiance has been on the rise
>thinking that solar radiance has steadily risen

I am an electrical engineer working in a closely related field, what do you want to know?