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I recently was in a discussion with mathmaticians who stated that one cannot predict weather past 72 hours of you will bias your conclusions.
That's my theory as well. It's as if humans weren't on the planet, it would be non-changing. The Earth will continue to change and evolve with or without us. Natural disasters are just that...natural. Nothing we can do about them. We can just try to prepare for them. Some seem to think we [humans] are all powerful and can destroy the planet. I fall into the category that we are pretty insignificant in regards to the planet. If the planet had consciousness, it would barely know we existed. The Earth is THAT HUGE. And in one volcanic blast, it can spew out more global warming emissions than we ever have to date, yet recover just fine.Philotomy Jurament wrote:
Arrogance/it's-all-about-us-complex and politics, most likely.
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I recently was in a discussion with mathmaticians who stated that one cannot predict weather past 72 hours of you will bias your conclusions.
I can attest to this..... I get real twitchy when ask about wx 4-5 days out! A lot of times 36+ hours isn't easy either!
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That's my theory as well. It's as if humans weren't on the planet, it would be non-changing. The Earth will continue to change and evolve with or without us. Natural disasters are just that...natural. Nothing we can do about them. We can just try to prepare for them. Some seem to think we [humans] are all powerful and can destroy the planet. I fall into the category that we are pretty insignificant in regards to the planet. If the planet had consciousness, it would barely know we existed.
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The Earth is THAT HUGE.
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As an aside, I'd give global warming more credence if so many politicians weren't strong arming it. The way I see it, politicians really only want what gets them and their side more power, and they will use things like global warming to accomplish that.
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All of Gideon Thorne's last post
Metathiax wrote:
I can understand why would someone believe that. Predicting the weather involves too many variables to be an "exact science". It is based on statistics and probabilities (as pretty much everything else btw). Physics doesn't even allow the exact calculation of the simultaneous movement of 3 bodies in space and yet the NASA still manage to send rovers on Mars by using approximations on Newton's laws. Similarly, chemists are also able to predict the behavior of billions of molecules at a time. Science can still be extremely useful even if it doesn't provide 100% accuracy (which is, btw, theoretically impossible since the simple observation of a phenomenon is sufficient to influence it at least infinitesimally).
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To GT's post and this, yes, I concede that we can have an effect on the environment just as the natural environmental occurrences can have an effect. I was looking at things from a "destroying the planet" sort of thing. Destroying ourselves? Yeah, I can see us capable of doing that. Through greenhouse gas emissions? I'm not convinced.Metathiax wrote:
We are unlikely to destroy the planet but it is far more likely that we can destroy ourselves.
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Human activity is capable of provoking natural disasters.
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I am a chemist.
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When he says one biased the predictions by merely calculating them, they do.
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For real evidence, we nead hundreds of thousands of years of data that mankind cannot generate. No matter what soil or ice samples tell us, there are too many variables.
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I have an idea. Let's enact environmental standards that cripple the economy of the United States. That would, in turn, neuter the world economy and drive the standard of living of every single human being into that of about, oh, 8000 B.C. I think if we can do this, and somehow avoid the entire world descending into rampant chaos, we can keep the world from warming, oh, 1 degree Celsius on average over the next 50 years.
Wake me when a *real* problem is rearing its ugly head. Like, say, Iran getting nukes....wait...
Holy turds! The Northwest Passage is thawing? I guess that's why it's a passage.
Ask people in Oswego, NY if they give a crap about the oceans being an inch higher under their 8 feet of snow. Those people are pretty glad we have cheap electricity and fossil fuels for heat, right about now.
I'd say we could go back to burning whale oil, but that'd piss off another sect of environmentalists.
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Name one natural disaster provoked by human activity. Feel free to back this up with sources, and not conjecture.
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A common question is whether global warming will cause less frequent or delicate tropical cyclones. So far, virtually all climatologists agree that a single storm, or even a single season, cannot clearly be attributed to a single cause such as global warming or natural variation.[109] The question, therefore, is whether a statistical trend in frequency or strength of cyclones exists.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory performed a simulation that concluded "the strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."[110]
In an article in Nature,[111] Kerry Emanuel stated that potential hurricane destructiveness, a measure combining hurricane strength, duration, and frequency, "is highly correlated with tropical sea surface temperature, reflecting well-documented climate signals, including multidecadal oscillations in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and global warming." He predicts "a substantial increase in hurricane-related losses in the twenty-first century."[111]
Along similar lines, P.J. Webster and others published an article[112] in Science[112] examining "changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity" over the last 35 years, a period when satellite data has been available. The main finding is that while the number of cyclones "decreased in all basins except the North Atlantic during the past decade," there has been a "large increase in the number and proportion of hurricanes reaching categories 4 and 5." That is, while the number of cyclones has decreased overall, the number of very strong cyclones has increased.
Both Emanuel and Webster et al. consider sea surface temperatures to be very important in the development of cyclones. The question then becomes: what caused the observed increase in sea surface temperatures? In the Atlantic, it could be due to global warming and the hypothesized Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), a possible 5070 year pattern of temperature variability. Emanuel, however, found the recent temperature increase was outside the range of previous sea surface temperature peaks. So, both global warming and a natural variation (such as the AMO) could have made contributions to the warming of the tropical Atlantic over the past decades, but an exact attribution is so far impossible to make.[109]
While Emanuel analyzed total annual energy dissipation, Webster et al. analyzed the percentage of hurricanes in the combined categories 4 and 5 and found that this percentage has increased in six hurricane basins: North Atlantic, North East and North West Pacific, South Pacific, and North and South Indian.
Assuming that the six basins are statistically independent except for the effect of global warming,[113] zFacts has carried out the obvious paired t-test and found that the null-hypothesis of no impact of global warming on the percentage of category 4 and 5 hurricanes can be rejected at the 0.1% level. This means that there is only a 1 in 1000 chance of simultaneously finding the observed six increases in the percentages of category 4 and 5 hurricanes. This statistic needs refining because the variables being tested are not normally distributed with equal variances, but it may provide the best evidence yet that the impact of global warming on hurricane intensity has been detected.
Fiffergrund wrote:
I have an idea. Let's enact environmental standards that cripple the economy of the United States.
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Name one natural disaster provoked by human activity.
Unproven dude! In the '60's we were hit just as bad as that year. The difference was that there were a LOT less people living in those areas hit back then. Every 30 years or so there is a serious increase in hurricane activity in that region, going all the way back to Ponce de Leon on record and I'm sure many years beyond that.gideon_thorne wrote:
Katrina, Rita. There's two. Caused by the same activity which is altering weather patterns across the globe, that being human alteration of the environment. ^_~`
Nature can and does fix and reclaim all that. Nothing's as powerful as nature man!Quote:
I offer as a source all the construction, oil spills, landscape alteration and massive cities constructed since civilization began.
Dristram wrote:
Unproven dude!
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Nature can and does fix and reclaim all that. Nothing's as powerful as nature man!
Metathiax wrote:
So am I... In what field?
Sorry, could you rephrase that?
What do we make of the measured increase in temperatures of the last century then?
mordrene wrote:
agreed. if the age of the earth was 24 hours then mankind would have been around for what.. a few minutes. after that, how long has there been emperical data for weather patterns. with that little of information how can anyone predict what the earths climate is about to do? I recently was in a discussion with mathmaticians who stated that one cannot predict weather past 72 hours of you will bias your conclusions.
Fiffergrund wrote:
Name one natural disaster provoked by human activity. Feel free to back this up with sources, and not conjecture.
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Unproven dude! In the '60's we were hit just as bad as that year. The difference was that there were a LOT less people living in those areas hit back then. Every 30 years or so there is a serious increase in hurricane activity in that region, going all the way back to Ponce de Leon on record and I'm sure many years beyond that.
What's really funny is how it was predicted by scientists and environmentalists that the following year would be worse...and it ended up being a timid year. Many lost their jobs from that prediction...or should have...because it caused such a scare and hurt Florida's economy and housing market.
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what field do you work in?
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You guys have no idea how entertaining I found this thread. Thanks for the laughs, guys!
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Challenge accepted, sir! Hey, I'll give you two! And these are incontrovertibly proven, as a bonus.
The spread of the deserts.
The current mass-extinction event.
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All I'm asking for is proof, say, that hurricanes are historically more powerful than they have been in the past and that this is directly caused by human activity. Not hypothesis, not what Al Gore believes just to keep himself in the public eye...proof.
Metathiax wrote:
I have already answered that specific issue in a previous post...
Fiffergrund wrote:
Not really. You provided proof that there *could* be an impact. There were statistical questions raised even in the information you provided.
This is far from being able to say Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming, or even that global warming is caused by man.
To claim Hurricane Katrina, or any other weather phenomenon, could be caused by man-made global warming is irresponsible at this stage.
It was a bit of an in-jest statement, but with the background that nature eventually recovers from our man-made disasters just as it recovers from its own, which are often way worse than what we cause. I had seen a special on the largest oil spill in the history of the planet and it was caused by the Earth itself. There are certain parts of the world where oil is periodically released into the ocean through earthquakes and such which creates natural oil spills. The ocean is one huge washing machine and cleans itself up. Slowly to human standards, but light speed compared to Earth time.gideon_thorne wrote:
Are you suggesting that man is somehow outside of nature? And not an unbalanced part of it? ^_~`
