Be the first to know about breaking news, articles, and updates.
The Coast | News, events, restaurants, concerts and Burger Week for Halifax, Nova Scotia
Home of the Best of Halifax Reader's Choice Awards, the award-winning independent newspaper covers the Halifax news, politics, events, concerts, movies, restaurants, and nightlife scene.
Do you really think that blindly accepting every environmental or carbon tax scheme is going to save this planet? The last I heard, our road taxes were never spent on roads. What makes you so naive to think that anything has changed? —Taxed and Sceptical
This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2012.
10 Comments
Carbon taxes are not a perfect solution to the climate change crisis but they are something. A step in the right direction. Or are you a skeptic by convenience? You want to deny the issue because it means some sort of sacrifice from all of us.
Alright enough of a break
I agree with tf and also think and extra point that might branch a bit into what the poster might be onto is that people think the carbon situation is the win all or lose all in the environmental crisis and this is not true. The correlation between C02 and temperature isn’t as established as the average media brainwashed person thinks. There is another position in the climate change debate. Water vapor in the form of humidity in particular is by far the most powerful and pervasive greenhouse gas in the atmosphere (this is agreed by both sides but the significance of which the relationship of C02 an water vapor influences temperature is impossible to model properly). The largest conduit for the atmosphere to lose heat that has already been absorbed is precipitation (big storms big atmospheric heat loss this is known), and that process is so enormously complex NO supercomputer can model it, this is a huge problem for scientists attempting to prove that man caused global warming is happening.
I think we are influencing the weather but am leaning away from these doomsday warnings. Might it be more important to preserve habitat than assume that the C02 “problem” will ultimately solve all the environmental problems when there are definitely more problem causing agents than C02, like deforestation, mass animal grazing farming effluent and so on?
Let’s put even more effort into habitat conservation and let people know that C02 conservation is not the only thing needed that will “save” the planet. We do have to get off oil for other obvious reasons (chemicals, spills) but it’s not the only thing to focus on right now. When a species is gone it’s gone forever. The weather always changes.
So, pretty good for someone with a “mongoloid shaped head” as said by a crap tattoo on a previous post;)
Oops by “prove” what I really meant was have a strong enough theory to greatly warrant a belief that supports the correlative evidence. Whether or not something can be proven is obviously another debate.
Tl;dr
based on this little tid bit, agent 195, you’re not missing anything.
“The largest conduit for the atmosphere to lose heat that has already been absorbed is precipitation (big storms big atmospheric heat loss this is known), and that process is so enormously complex NO supercomputer can model it, this is a huge problem for scientists attempting to prove that man caused global warming is happening. “
no CURRENT supercomputer can model it….
I’m pretty sure if you told a computer scientist 15 years ago that there would be one that can completely destroy two geniuses at jeopardy in real time, he’d laugh in your face.
until Moore’s law starts to hit the wall (approx another decade or so) you really don’t know what we’ll be able to accurately model with a computer.
oh, my mistake. as a followup:
“a variety of factors, such as technological barriers, will slow the process, leading them to believe that processors still have 75 years of evolution left. “
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2009…
so ya never know… when I’m old and grey, if I somehow manage to get that far, they may be able to accurately and conclusively tell me the weather.
Fire rage. Once you have the computer capability how are you going to collect the basically infinite amount of temperature and composition data that amounts to the complexity of the entire earth and solar activity+cosmic radiation, program it into the computer then press enter. This will be the ultimate problem. Not trying still will get us nowhere though.
ah.. because I said it would be a walk in the park???
we can already reliably predict around a few days ahead…
I don’t think it much of a stretch with quantitatively many higher magnitudes of computing power that we can bring it to within hours… then minutes… then seconds… over time.
Daniel, CO2 is a greenhouse gas meaning it traps solar radiation and converts it into heat. Human activity dumps about five billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually. How can mankind possibly not have a major impact on climate change?
I never said that we don’t have a major impact I just said that we don’t know what the impact is, and should have been more clear in stating that the only constant in climate is change. C02 is also miniscule compared to water vapor as a greenhouse gas, and rain is a MAJOR heat losing occurrence you should look into the science it’s quite surprising.
Also I’m just concerned that people are forgetting about other environmental issues by thinking that stopping C02 is the ONE win ALL. It’s not that simple.