Climate Change is not a Political Issue.

[brutah]

I'd like to know why the climate change thread was moved.

It's a very real issue and something that greatly affects the ski industry.

TGR and its moderators are doing us all a disservice by moving the thread and thereby silencing us. Climate change is something that should not be ignored and brushed under the rug (or moved to a forum that gets little views), it needs to be in everyone face. TGR is showcasing "Jeremy Jones Responds To Donald Trump Pulling Out of Paris Climate Agreement" on its popular this week on TGR sidebar, yet they move the Climate Change thread. that's hypocritical.

Climate Change is not a political issue but the greatest issue facing humanity.

[Dexter Rutecki]

Same disservice in moving any political thread--and who appointed these schmucks as the gods who determine what merits inclusion and what gets tossed as dregs? We should get rid of polyass and let everything be as it was--pretty simple, you don't like it, don't click on it. No need to whine that somehow your day was ruined because you suffered the assault of seeing a political topic in the PR.

Never shoulda started down this path--part of the reason this place sucks so hard these days.

[DBdude]

climate change is a political issue in 'merica, and that really says something about us

[Dexter Rutecki]

Says something about some of us. Everyone else believes in science.

[brutah]

climate change is a political issue in 'merica, and that really says something about us

I agree and its very unfortunate it. But I think the tides are turning especially since Trump made a terrible decision to pull 'merica out of the Paris Climate Accord. An old friend of mine wrote this in the Huffington Post. I hope what he writes comes true and that the entire next election (2018 and 2020) will be a referendum on climate action.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b00573ab57a3d7

[nickinbc]

A bit like saying Trump isn't a politician.

(Not that I think that he is any more than a self important, self interested, self publicist)

[Powcruzer]

One word. Paris.

[AmmergauerTele]

Not saying that glaciers aren't shrinking...just skeptical. Earth 5 billion years old and we have good data for how long of that period?
May want to read a few of these:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...noaa-manipula/
https://realclimatescience.com/2016/...ata-tampering/

Have a feeling due to Saturday night in London climate change we be quite far on the back-burner for the next few years.

[k2skier112]

Not saying that glaciers aren't shrinking...just skeptical. Earth 5 billion years old and we have good data for how long of that period?
May want to read a few of these:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...noaa-manipula/
https://realclimatescience.com/2016/...ata-tampering/

Have a feeling due to Saturday night in London climate change we be quite far on the back-burner for the next few years.

https://nsidc.org/

[AmmergauerTele]

I guess I'm mostly skeptical that humans are 100% causing all the warming, by cutting CO2 emissions we can slow / reverse? Is there direct linkage? What caused the ice age then warming? Probably under informed on my part.

[brutah]

Not saying that glaciers aren't shrinking...just skeptical. Earth 5 billion years old and we have good data for how long of that period?
May want to read a few of these:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...noaa-manipula/
https://realclimatescience.com/2016/...ata-tampering/

Have a feeling due to Saturday night in London climate change we be quite far on the back-burner for the next few years.

You might as well site beitbart because both of those websites have strong biases and are not reliable. Realscienceclimate.com is basically a climate denier propaganda website. GTFO with that nonsense.

"Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities." -NASA

Scientist's worldwide agree humans are contributing to climate change and environmental warming. This debate is over. Climate change is real and continuing to drag our feet will and is creating mass extinctions.

https://www.ipcc.ch/

Why do you fear change and innovation? What's wrong with a cleaner energy source? Even if climate change was a hoax (which it is NOT), isn't switching to solar and wind energy a win-win? Its cheaper in the long run and sustainable and doesn't cause pollution and pump carcinogens into the environment. What is so great about coal and Petro based energy sources?

[hutash]

Probably under informed on my part.

This

Quit while you are behind. There are people who actually study and understand this shit.

[SJG]

First off, EVERYTHING is a political issue in the USA.

Secondly, "what" warming? It's pretty funny how people only focus on stuff like the past 50 years, and it's easy to make a "trend" obvious by only looking at 1% of the whole picture. Like the legendary Hockey Stick. I have observed it's going to be fucking hot this Summer based on today, and the current trend since January for example. At this rate we'll have highs of 150F by September ;-)

3rd, we aren't even close to as warm as we've been a few times in the past. So the alarmists have little credibility, since we've been there before



It's also fun to look at the performance of their models projections against reality, over the past 30 years. It's very easy to "project" doom/gloom, but how accurate were they?



Well, NOT. So those models didn't work, but we are supposed to trust the ones they have now, right? They rarely even get the weather right 10 days out, and we are supposed to believe what they say about 20-50 years down the road? LOL

Lastly, the "link" of CO2 to temps is non-existent, further eroding any remaining credibility. See the correlation of CO2 to temps? LOL



Also, if you are old and sober enough to remember the 70s, you'd recall they were pounding the table about the imminent "Ice Age" coming back then. They wouldn't shut up about it, TV, newspapers, magazines, etc. Heck, even a book (ICE!) was written about it in 1978, which was then made into a movie (The Day After Tomorrow)

Granted, the 1970s were some brutal Winters (especially back East), if you didn't know.

The reality is nobody knows what is going to happen, and when any Gov't gets involved, it's almost always to raise taxes and shuffle acquired money to themselves and their buddies, so they can fly around in their private jets going to parties and conventions claiming to be protecting the environment, LOL.

These are a few of the reasons a lot of guys don't buy into the "Global Warming" camp.

[Tye 1on]

yeah, we may have been a little quick on the trigger there, apologies. [to Brutah, Dex can STFU about letting the forums just go back to pre-polyass days].

it's hard not to think of a thread as anything but political asshattery when Trump is a topic in it. But no doubt that skiing specifically, and all action sports generally, are vulnerable for huge impacts if climate trends continue.

[TBS]

Energy executives see little little impact from US pulling out of Paris Accords
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/...is-accord.html

"We are in an energy transition. The energy transition is unstoppable," said Ben van Beurden, CEO of Shell. "Ultimately it is policy, public sentiment, but also technology that's driving it. It is fundamentally a force that cannot be stopped, irrespective of what any actors, even if they are large actors like the United States, decide to do in relation to Paris."

[LegoSkier]

The longer version of my rant from the other thread...
Given what is going on today I guess it’s time for Cyrus’ Global Warming rant. I sit back and watch people discuss the ridiculously complex minutiae of esoteric climate science and get all worked up into a huff about this stuff and I see it as just a distraction from what are the important questions to ask. Look, we have been using this esoteric climate science and complex computer models about CO2 concentrations and temperature and sea level to really just figure out the answers to two questions. Now, the questions are at their core societal but I am going to frame them in a singular form for simplicity:

1. Is my life going to get worse because of global warming?

2. Should I be burning fossil fuels to do work?

That’s really it. All this effort and argument has been to figure out the answers to those two questions.

For answering the first question, that is a perfect use for climate science and computer models and such. That is what that type of science is for. Asking whether sea level is going to rise flooding my house, whether rain is going to stop falling and my crops will fail, whether fish are going to die and I won’t catch them anymore is the domain of that type of science. We should continue to do the science and figure out our best answers to those problems.

For answering the second question, that is a ridiculous and insane use of climate science and it was a great mistake to try and answer it in the frame of Global Warming. When we did that, we opened up the answer to all sorts of uncertainty and confusion and political obfuscation. The science, like all science, is not exact because it is uncertain and leaves so much room for useless debate. We should immediately stop trying to use the investigation of Global Warming when trying to answer the question of whether we should be burning fossil fuels. Instead, here is the correct way to answer that question: No, we should not be burning fossil fuels to do work. In fact, we should not be burning any fuel to do work (fossilized or not). Why? Here’s why:

1. Using energy sources efficiently is a moral imperative.

2. Burning stuff (combustion) is an inherently inefficient way to use energy as stated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That cannot be changed no matter what our technology.

3. Therefore, we shouldn’t be burning stuff to do work. Period. Question answered.

At their core, organic fuels (including fossil fuels) are secondary forms of energy. What this means is that they are chemically stored forms of a primary energy source (usually solar energy) that we then use inefficiently by burning to do work. So let’s look at using coal to generate electricity. The chain of events looks something like this:

Energy from the Sun hits Earth
|
Life (plants, algae, plankton, etc.) use this energy to grow organic carbon mass.
|
Organic carbon mass get buried and over millions of years of geologic pressure gets converted into coal
|
We dig up the coal and burn it using a process that can never be efficient in converting the heat of burning coal into electrical energy

OK, let’s look at solar energy:

Energy from the Sun hits the Earth
|
We convert the energy into electricity

Now, solar panels are currently not very efficient but there is no inherent limit on converting solar energy into electricity. There is a theoretically attainable 100% efficient way to convert that energy into electricity, unlike combustion which can never be 100% efficient. Also, the first one has four steps and is dependent on other forms of life to first convert the Sun’s energy into organic matter then millions of years of geologic pressure to get it to a point where we can even use the stuff. The second one has two steps and is an immediate, direct conversion.

All of this gets to the bigger point about burning organic fuels: using fuels is using a secondary source of energy. It is waiting on something else to convert a primary source of energy into a burnable form. We should only be using primary energy sources to do work in our civilization. These are:

1. The energy from the Sun

2. The energy from the movement of the atmosphere/rotation of the planet

3. The energy from gravity

4. The energy from geological forces

5. The energy from atomic bonds

If it isn’t directly using one of those five primary sources, we shouldn’t be using it to do work. And we sure as heck shouldn’t be burning things to do work. If I was suddenly made the emperor of the Earth, I would do away with the Paris Climate Accord and its great discussions of CO2 PPM and forecasted warming and such. Instead there would be the following goal:

- By the year 2100 human civilization will not in any way use the burning of fuels to do work.

That’s the starting point. The future emerges from there.

[AK47bp]

I guess I'm mostly skeptical that humans are 100% causing all the warming, by cutting CO2 emissions we can slow / reverse? Is there direct linkage? What caused the ice age then warming? Probably under informed on my part.

Climate change is part of the planets natural cycles, the thing is Humans are speeding up that cycle unnaturally, which is not good for humans and the planet.

That's my uneducated Cliff Notes version.

[Dexter Rutecki]

yeah, we may have been a little quick on the trigger there, apologies. [to Brutah, Dex can STFU about letting the forums just go back to pre-polyass days].

Yeah, we wouldn't want this place to be in danger of not sucking immensely anymore. So you're on board with the types who can't handle themselves in the presence of a potentially disturbing thread--don't make that decision for everyone else (I know it was that other idiot's decision originally, but regardless it was the beginning of the current suckage). Less moderation was better, and for the years since you guys started stepping in we have been steadily proving the truth of that--doesn't even matter, really, who is charged with it.

The 'mistake' with the global warming thread just proves the inherent problem with this shit. Give it up.

[old goat]

Not saying that glaciers aren't shrinking...just skeptical. Earth 5 billion years old and we have good data for how long of that period?
May want to read a few of these:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...noaa-manipula/
https://realclimatescience.com/2016/...ata-tampering/

Have a feeling due to Saturday night in London climate change we be quite far on the back-burner for the next few years.

Skeptical that the glaciers are shrinking? You should spend more time in the mountains and less time reading crap. Anyone who spends time in the big mountains knows the glaciers are shrinking. (Or did I misread you?) As far as whether global warming is as important as terrorism--in the decades to come more people will die from climate change than from terrorism, by many orders of magnitude. And terrorism will increase as more and more people are displaced by drought, megastorms, and rising sea level.
http://www.businessinsider.com/clima...s-risks-2017-6

[AK47bp]

Yeah, we wouldn't want this place to be in danger of not sucking immensely anymore. So you're on board with the types who can't handle themselves in the presence of a potentially disturbing thread--don't make that decision for everyone else (I know it was that other idiot's decision originally, but regardless it was the beginning of the current suckage). Less moderation was better, and for the years since you guys started stepping in we have been steadily proving the truth of that--doesn't even matter, really, who is charged with it.

The 'mistake' with the global warming thread just proves the inherent problem with this shit. Give it up.

Whoa. He told you.

[klar]

As I said in the other thread: I am a climate scientist, like, with a degree and shit. If people actually have specific questions about some science-related aspect and want input, I'll make a genuine attempt to answer.

[AmmergauerTele]

OK I'll take a stab....

Say we cut carbon emissions in half, how much will the earth stop cooling / heating? I guess that is more of what I am curious about. Earth is warming, so if we take austere measures what will the outcome be.

[Buster Highmen]

Lastly, the "link" of CO2 to temps is non-existent, further eroding any remaining credibility. See the correlation of CO2 to temps? LOL


These are a few of the reasons a lot of guys don't buy into the "Global Warming" camp.

The abstract of the article from which the co2/temp correlation says:


The relation between the partial pressure of atmospheric carbon dioxide (pCO2) and Paleogene climate is poorly resolved. We used stable carbon isotopic values of di-unsaturated alkenones extracted from deep sea cores to reconstruct pCO2 fromthe middle Eocene to the late Oligocene (∼45 to 25 million years ago). Our results demonstrate that pCO2 ranged between 1000 to 1500 parts per million by volume in the middle to late Eocene, then decreased in several steps during the Oligocene, and reached modern levels by the latest Oligocene. The fall in pCO2 likely allowed for a critical expansion of ice sheets on Antarctica and promoted conditions that forced the onset of terrestrial C4 photosynthesis.[

See http://science.sciencemag.org/content/309/5734/600 .

So I think there's some misunderstanding regarding that article.

[panchosdad]

As I said in the other thread: I am a climate scientist, like, with a degree and shit. If people actually have specific questions about some science-related aspect and want input, I'll make a genuine attempt to answer.

Thanks Klar. Here's a question not about the scientific minutia but rather about "the science".

I come from the perspective that we absolutely ought to be reducing carbon consumption to reduce our impact on climate change, yet I still hesitate to call Human caused global warming a scientific fact. This seems to upset some of my friends, some of whom think I'm some kind of denier kook. But my take is this, since we're saying the "scientific consensus" is that our human production of greenhouse gases is causing the climate to warm, isn't that an admission that the climate change theories are more of well supported theory and fall short of scientific fact? Maybe that's splitting hairs, but it seems much more honest to admit there is some room for doubt in the science. After all, the history of science is replete with examples of the scientific consensus being wrong.

So where would you put the confidence level of scientists in the current theories? Are you 90% certain this is what will happen? 95%? 100%.

Thanks for your thoughtful posts.

[Buster Highmen]

But my take is this, since we're saying the "scientific consensus" is that our human production of greenhouse gases is causing the climate to warm, isn't that an admission that the climate change theories are more of well supported theory and fall short of scientific fact? Maybe that's splitting hairs, but it seems much more honest to admit there is some room for doubt in the science. After all, the history of science is replete with examples of the scientific consensus being wrong.

I don't think there are any scientific facts.

Pardon me for butting in, but I think that's fundamental.

Science consists of theories that change from polemic to paradigm based on consensus. So, yeah, I think there should be room for doubt, but that doesn't mean one can ostrich away from the data and consensus.

One of the well known climate scientists (strictly speaking he's an atmospheric scientist), Cliff Mass, has written a bunch about this and while being in support of the theory of AGW, he's constantly accused of being a climate denier because of this position on the nature of scientific thought.

See this:
http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016...-weatherperson

and this:
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/0...rticle-is.html

and especially this:
http://archive.seattleweekly.com/hom...mate-change-is

and really especially this:
http://www.thestranger.com/features/...in-the-balance .