I got a comment on this post I did in June Sex, Lies and Videotape (ok, no sex- sorry) which put forward a couple of the classic ideas that global warming deniers are using to fool people. The commenter was referring to my use of the “Simon and Garfunkel” quote to illustrate that deniers, and those who are fooled by their idiotic, irresponsible rubbish, are wearing blinkers to shut out what they don’t want to see or hear. This is what they wrote in their comment:
“a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” also applies to the Climate Change believers too!
Fact is, there's no such thing as 'normal' weather or climate, we just happen to be in a reasonably stable period, but if things are changing it could be due to natural cycles we just don't understand yet”.
This annoyed me greatly that someone could just so blithely ignore everything else that might conflict with their wishful thinking and then so confidently spout bullshit. I did a long reply and I think it is justified to re-use it as a post. I have added to the original a little.
This is my answer to “anonymous’s” comment:
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No, it really doesn't apply to the Climate Change "believers" too. With this one comment you display your complete ignorance of the reality of the situation.
A huge mistake that critics like you tend to make is to believe that everybody's opinion, in “debates” like this, is of equal value. It is not. There is a fundamental difference between the opinion of the man in the pub who believes something because he once read a half understood article or saw a half-remembered documentary on TV such as that out and out garbage "The Great Global warming Swindle" that seemed pretty convincing to him and, on the other hand, the opinion of people who stake their position based upon tens of thousands of man years of work by climate scientists publishing peer reviewed scientific papers, building on what is known and predicting most likely outcomes based on this. It's like asking a four year old and a NASA scientist what the Moon is made of, then, because of your particular prejudices, which make you want to believe that the Moon is made of green cheese, you go with the answer of the four year old. Clearly, if you are gambling with eveybody’s future (which you are if you cling to your beliefs) it should be wisest to believe the NASA scientist rather than the four year old or the propagandists.
What to believe should not be a matter solely of whatever you want to believe. It's not even a matter of democratically counting up who believes what and going with the majority - that is mere politics. It is a matter of assessing whose viewpoint is credible or not and then making a risk assessment of who it would be safest to listen to. Big clue: it's not the irresponsible idiots who claim there is nothing to worry about!
You wrote: "Fact is, there's no such thing as 'normal' weather or climate, we just happen to be in a reasonably stable period, but if things are changing it could be due to natural cycles we just don't understand yet"
Do you honestly think that climate scientists don't know about the normal state of the climate? - about the many other "normal" states of the climate that have existed over the millennia and the savage climate instability and disruption and mass extinction of species that sometimes occurs when one normal state of the climate changes to another? And yet you and your ilk want to risk everybody's neck because you don’t want to believe in the science or the risk analysis? You lot are mad, bad or dangerous to know!
The change of the climate from one "normal" state to another has happened many times in the past, often with catastrophic consequences for most of the life on earth at the time. But… the factors which set off these "flips" back then built up over a long period of time. What scares many climate scientists, and knowledgeable people, rigid is the certain knowledge that the rate we have been pouring carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, deforesting and changing land use, and massively increasing the number of ruminant cattle (which generate lots of methane) is far, far, far, faster than anything that natural cycles ever did. We're not talking weeks or months but in terms of a decade or three. It may take a long time for a supertanker to change its direction because it’s big and heavy but Earth is considerably bigger and heavier and human induced climate change does not happen overnight but is certainly happening at an "unnaturally fast" rate. Because of this inertia, we already have a couple of decades of emissions "in the climate bank" that have yet to change supertanker Earth's direction. Similarly, any changes to green house emissions that we set in motion now will take a long time before they affect the momentum of the supertanker. This is why it is hyper-stupid to "wait until the science is settled" as some deniers/delayers call for. By the time we know for sure, it will be much too late to stop things.
The propaganda "it’s normal for the climate to change"and the "inadequately understood natural cycles" ideas are framed in a poisonously misleading way. They are deliberately used by deniers to fool ordinary people because they seem plausible. They invite you to jump to the false logical conclusion that, if the climate is changing, it must be due to natural causes. You have been sucked in. Climate scientists are generally far more knowledgeable about climate than the average person (duhhh!). The major natural cycles are well understood and black propaganda, such that the observed global warming (which even the contrarian scientists admit is happening) is down to cycles in the sun, has also been demolished, not least in several of the other videos in the "crock of the week" series on this blog if you could have been bothered to look, instead of reflexively shooting from the hip.
The root of the apparent plausibility of this particular piece of propaganda is based upon the following slippery idea which you will have no doubt seen on the websites you favour - "the Earth is so huge, and we humans are so small, that we cannot possibly be having an effect on it, therefore if we see anything happening it must be due to natural cycles". It is laughably ridiculous, as anyone with basic mathematical knowledge should realise if they divide up the surface area of earth between the 6.6 billion inhabitants to find out how much "land" each person has as their “share”.
To save you the time, the answer is a square 150 metres on a side, or about 2.25 hectares. This is the space within which all the crops you eat have to be grown; all your food animals have to be grazed in; all the food plants to make the feed supplement have to be grown; all the trees and plants, that create our share of the oxygen that we need to breathe have to grow in; all the materials to make your car, your house, your share of the roads and the buildings you work in, your share of the factories that make the consumer goods that you use - all these materials have to be extracted from your 150 metres square patch.
Further, all the pollution and habitat destruction and erosion that you are responsible for when you buy consumer products and services all has to happen to your small patch. All the exhaust gases from your car and central heating... etc etc and finally all the waste material that you throw away and the waste material generated in goods manufacture all has to find a final resting place in your patch.
Think about these figures – they are easy to check with a calculator. They should be taught in all schools so that people can get a sense of proportion of just how crowded Earth really is. All you have to do is research what the surface area of Earth is. 70% of this is ocean so work out 30% of this area then divide it by 6.5 billion people – simples!
When you have done this, never ever again believe anyone if they tell you that humans have an insignificant effect on our planet and that we cannot be altering the climate at an unprecedented rate.
8 comments:
The surface area of the planet is about 500,000,000 square km. There are about 6,600,000,000 of us alive right now. That means we get 7.5% of a square km each, 13 of us share each square km.
What about the atmosphere above us then? Google also found me this :
"The stratosphere starts just above the troposphere and extends to 50 kilometers (31 miles) high. Ninety-nine percent of "air" is located in the troposphere and stratosphere." So each person on the earth can claim that their share of all the available air is a box of the following proportions:
an area of land 274m square and everything above it for 30 miles! Are all your efforts in your lifetime seriously going to make much impact upon that?
We all love to think we're right. Can you prove it though?
You have made an error in your assumptions.
Firstly, for anyone following this thread, here is a handy source for the basic figures involved:
http://www.fisicx.com/quickreference/earth/statistics.html
I am glad you took the time to "do the math". However, you worked it out that we have "an area of land 274m square". This is not so. We each have an area of land AND SEA which is about 275 metres square.
Note, I did not mention the sea food we use although I did point out that "All you have to do is research what the surface area of Earth is. 70% of this is ocean so work out 30% of this area then divide it by 6.5 billion people".
If you take 30% (land area is actually closer to 29%) of your 274 metres square figure, you will arrive at my figure of about 150 metres square land surface each, which is correct. I first did these calculations over forty years ago (without a calculator!) so you are wasting your time if think that you will find an error in them.
The basic error of assumption that I referred to is in your atmospheric calculation. Discounting that much of the "activity" in one's personal share of the atmosphere takes place only in the very bottom bit where the plants and clouds and land is, and taking the whole atmosphere right up to space into the calculation, we have to remember that atmospheric pressure falls off rapidly with height.
You assumed that the "everything above it for 30 miles!" column of atmosphere above your head is equally available to dissipate pollution into. Consider that a toy balloon's worth of pollution at ground level, if taken up to - say - 25 miles above our heads occupies a much larger volume. To consider the degree of pollution you're causing in your personal area by your activities it's best to consider the relative proportions of molecules and the easiest "back of an envelope way" to do this is to consider your 150 square metres of land as if it's inside a sphere-like spaceship where the atmospheric pressure is similar both at "ground level" and at the edge of the sphere so any pollution you create anywhere within your sphere has a similar concentration. Compressing the atmosphere over your head into a suitable size to judge the space you've got to leave your environmental footprints all over leads to the following facts:
Each person's environmental "spaceship" can be seen as a sphere about 1km in diameter within which we have a patch of
"Earth" about 270 meters square, 70% of which is ocean, leaving the
aforementioned patch of land 150 metres square to live on.
Although the real calculation is more complex if you want to take into account that some pollution that we emit takes a very long time, if at all, to diffuse evenly through the atmospheric column above our heads, the simple version I just mentioned actually is a best case scenario - the true equivalent size of our personal atmospheric globe is actually a fair bit smaller than the 1km diameter I stated.
You finish by saying Are all your efforts in your lifetime seriously going to make much impact upon that?
Part 2
Go out into an open space. Walk 150 metres. Imagine your personal square of land. Look at a spot 500 metres away - that is the edge of your spaceship. Imagine the space in the globe surrounding you - nothing gets in or out - do you seriously think that your activities cannot affect that space? Remember that the global warming (and other) gases emitted in China (or wherever) in the manufacturing of the goods you buy and in the extraction of the raw materials they are made from (and the transport emissions of all this stuff around the world) is also in your globe. Frankly, if you still can't see the problem there is no hope for you. Clearly, you are only hearing what you want to hear and thinking what you want to think and damn reality for trying to burst your bubble - you're just refusing to listen to the inconvenient truth shown by cold hard maths and physics.
This actually bugs me a lot about deniers and anti-environmentalists generally - some of them are reasonably smart but, instead of using their brains to figure out and clarify reality, they use their minds to justify what they want to believe and their prejudices say. Their knee jerk reaction is to try and find fault whereas they should recognise the basic sense behind the whole subject, and if there is fault they should constructively try to improve things.
Bear in mind that the denial propagandists have come up with at least 50 plausible stories over the last 25 years to explain away the observed increase in average planetary temperature that even they have now given up denying is actually happening (they used to until the facts overwhelmed their lies and deceit!). Each of these stories was, as they portrayed it, sufficient to get greenhouse gases off the hook. 50 separate excuses to avoid facing up to the simple physics that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will retain more heat. Each excuse in turn has been shot down but they keep on coming up with new stories that get printed in uncritical magazines and newspapers and broadcast on TV - a brand new bunch of suckers sees the latest plausible lie and gets sucked in without suspecting that they have been fooled by serial black propagandists who are are either mad or bad - they are certainly dangerous to know.
There was no error in my maths,
Wikipedia confirms the surface area as stated.
Notice I was talking about the air volume we each have ("each person on the earth can claim that their share of all the available air") because it's the atmosphere we're talking about, although I admit my "area of land" should have been worded better.
The trouble is, neither of us can prove we're wrong or right, it's all just opinion and mine is that the Earth is self-regulating and we simply don't understand enough about it. You might claim that the majority of climatologists are on your side but the fact remains that scientists are frequently wrong and there's no sign of that stopping any time soon!
I will admit, however, that I am appalled with mankind's wasteful nature and pollution, for what it's worth.
This comedy sketch says it all.
This sketch was very funny too on the same episode, another thing I'm a sceptic of.
Yes, the sketches were good.
you wrote:
"There was no error in my maths,
Wikipedia confirms the surface area as stated."
I didn't say there was an error in your maths or your figures for the surface area of Earth. I just pointed out that you didn't do enough of the maths. The surface area you mention is the total surface area, land and sea. Once you get a figure for our share of the total surface area you have to take 30%'ish of that to get the land surface area per person = 150 metres square per person QED.
If you want another way to think about the personal amount of atmosphere we have to dissipate pollution/greenhouse gases in, you could take our 275 metres square patch which is 70% ocean with a 150 metres square area of land in it and work out the height of the column of air above your head, at constant pressure top and bottom. It is about 8.6 km or 5 miles.
Here are part of the calculations that I copied from a posting I made to a science based forum.
"The volume of our personal atmospheric space, a "right rectangular prism" (or tall thin
brick shape), is 278x278x8600 = 664,642,400 cu m. Convert this volume to a sphere and you get a radius of about 541 metres, which is a diameter of 1.08km
Q.E.D."
278 is our share of the area, 8.6km is the height of the column of air at constant pressure (take the pressure of air at sea level and then use the density of air at sea level to work out the equivalent height of the column of air above our heads).
I went on to convert this "right rectangular prism" to a sphere because I think that is easier for people to visualise.
you wrote:
"The trouble is, neither of us can prove we're wrong or right"
Not so. Loads can be proved. It's not "all just opinion" - opinions vary massively in their validity depending on whether they are held by people who have sufficient knowledge (or not) to back them up. Objectivity trumps subjectivity.
There seems to be some confusion (I'm being polite here) amongst deniers about the science. They confuse the physics of the situation, which is proved beyond all reasonable doubt, with the predictions based on that physics.
These predictions may be somewhat wrong, however they could be wrong either way. Things could be much better than the forecasts or they could be much worse - how lucky do you feel?
As far as the basic physics goes what follows is an unassailable fact - it's not an opinion - it is a rule of the Universe measured observed, experimented with and demonstrated for at least 100 years.
If the Earth was a featureless globe with a uniform surface, like a billiard ball, increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere absolutely, definitely would increase the surface temperature of Earth. Anyone who disputes this is ignorant of reality - end of story.
All the current argument is about how the extra heat retained is amplified or otherwise by feedback effects. Even the major credible denier scientists themselves (in actuality, very few in number) now admit that global warming is happening and that we are partially to blame - they just dispute that it will be a major problem.
If they're right, then good for them - they can say "told you so" and the rest of us will have egg on our faces when the sh*t doesn't hit the fan.
If they're wrong, and so many people had been lulled into a false sense of security by their reckless optimism that we did nothing, or not enough, to head off major climate destabilisation, (which would probably end our civilisation), then I think the survivors will be pretty angry at those who put ignorant personal opinion and wishful thinking above the warnings based on thousands of man-years of accumulated peer reviewed work in climate science.
But your last two paragraphs show that fear and emotion are trumping the objectivity you claim!
Can you PROVE - BEYOND ALL DOUBT - that excess CO2 will definitely increase the average global temperature without balancing mechanisms coming into play that we don't yet understand? Or that other phenomena may not be involved if it can actually be proven that average temperatures have risen taking into account the entire planet?
Whether increased clouds reflect light or marine life absorbs the extra C02, it's such a massively complex chaotic system that I believe it's arrogant to assume that anyone truly understands it.
Not long ago, respected scientists thought radiation was good for us! So excuse me if I tend to have less than 100% automatic respect for them!!
Good science is based upon limiting the effects of an experiment and observing the differences compared to a control sample. However, we simply don't know whether the ice caps would be retreating right now if mankind was still running around with spears. So, with only one set of data to play with and countless variables, you are indeed just observing apparent effects, making correlation assumptions, and pressurising the world to take action which may make absolutely zilch difference!
Yes I agree we have to follow the best most likely ASSUMPTIONS and act in ways most likely to protect our future, it would be foolish not to. But don't go stating things as fact when we simply can't know for sure.
Denier wrote:
Can you PROVE - BEYOND ALL DOUBT - that excess CO2 will definitely increase the average global temperature without balancing mechanisms coming into play that we don't yet understand? Or that other phenomena may not be involved if it can actually be proven that average temperatures have risen taking into account the entire planet?
Firstly, it is not necessary to prove it "beyond all doubt". Science doesn't do this so it appears that you do not know the philosophy of science although this paragraph of yours:
Good science is based upon limiting the effects of an experiment and observing the differences compared to a control sample. However, we simply don't know whether the ice caps would be retreating right now if mankind was still running around with spears. So, with only one set of data to play with and countless variables, you are indeed just observing apparent effects, making correlation assumptions, and pressurising the world to take action which may make absolutely zilch difference!
suggests you have some knowledge...
The whole point about climate predictions, as opposed to climate science, is that we cannot do experimental science with the climate, short of inventing a time machine and repeatedly going back and changing one parameter at a time and seeing what happened. A professional denier propaganda tactic is to claim that we need to wait until the science is "settled", deliberately trying to fool the public because science is never ever "settled" - it remains forever tentative. Even if we could wait, say, 15 years until the science was bullet proof we shouldn't because by then it would be too late.
We only get to run this experiment once - trouble is, we are in the test tube and there's a load of madmen out there, with the optimism of Annie "sun'll come out tomorra, bet your bottom dollar", that somehow bizarrely think that the uncertainties in the science will be in our favour and that magical, and as yet unknown or not understood, negative feedbacks will somehow automatically stabilise the climate so we can't screw it up.
They may be right but it would be insane to gamble on some negative feedback coming over the hill at the last second, like the US cavalry in a cowboy movie. I'm sorry, but the gamblers are just plainly blisteringly irresponsible and stupid.
Current observations of "real" reality, as opposed to computer modelled reality, are showing that the positive feedbacks are happening faster and stronger than originally estimated.
Deniers seem to have a silly idea that we are unable to affect the planet - that somehow there must always be some hidden natural cause.
Earth is clearly overcrowded, as shown in the previous calculations. We don't need hidden natural causes or wishful thinking feedbacks to explain matters when THE BASIC PHYSICS OF INFRA-RED THERMODYNAMICS is transparently obviously sufficient to show that increasing CO2 has had, is having and will have effects on planetary temperatures. The observed warming correlates well with the observed increasing CO2 levels, as basic experimental physics, that has been understood for over a hundred years, predicts.
Deniers are like the punk who faced up to Dirty Harry. Neither of them knew for sure ("beyond all doubt") whether there was a bullet left in the Magnum. The punk felt lucky, took a chance and died.
Deniers have a right to believe their rubbish but they also have an absolute duty not to drag us all down with them if they get listened to and thereby put everyone else at risk with their distorted thinking.
Looks like the US cavalry won't come over the hill in the nick of time!
click here for magic negative feedbacks being ridiculed
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