Gore still hot on his doomsday rhetoric

[Tallpine]

Pollution does affect us all

CO2 is not a pollutant. 

[MicroBalrog]

Pre-empting the factually correct response and calling apologism doesn't make it not factually correct.

Check the temperature in Crete on New Year's Day? That wasn't climate either, but it was rather hot.

The problem is that the same people who cry out CLIMATE IS NOT WEATHER today are the same people who had no problem referring to unusually hot weather last year as evidence of climate change.

[makattak]

The problem is that the same people who cry out CLIMATE IS NOT WEATHER today are the same people who had no problem referring to unusually hot weather last year as evidence of climate change.

DING DING DING DING DING

[dm1333]

Al Gore would be a lot more popular

I meant to write useful.  My bad.

[Iain]

The problem is that the same people who cry out CLIMATE IS NOT WEATHER today are the same people who had no problem referring to unusually hot weather last year as evidence of climate change.

Others being factually incorrect doesn't make those being factually correct apologists, so hardly a ding ding ding moment.

[dm1333]

The problem is that the same people who cry out CLIMATE IS NOT WEATHER today are the same people who had no problem referring to unusually hot weather last year as evidence of climate change.

Who are you referring to?  It certainly wasn't me and I'll stand by the statement that climate is not weather.  

CO2 is not a pollutant.

CO2 can most certainly be a pollutant.
 
 

  
 

[Tallpine]

CO2 can most certainly be a pollutant.

Well, I suppose oxygen can be a pollutant, too 

[dm1333]

Main Entry: pol·lut·ant
Pronunciation: \pə-ˈlü-tənt\
Function: noun
Date: 1892
: something that pollutes

Main Entry: pol·lu·tion
Pronunciation: \pə-ˈlü-shən\
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 : the action of polluting especially by environmental contamination with man-made waste; also : the condition of being polluted

Yes, oxygen can be a pollutant too. 

[Desertdog]

CO2 can most certainly be a pollutant.

Eliminate all CO2 in the atmosphere and die.  By eliminating CO2 you will eliminate all plant life which will eliminate you.

I will guess that you don't want to eliminate all of the CO2, just the excess.  The excess is what helps the plants grow bigger, as it gives them more food.  And like  humans, the plants grow bigger when they have more food to eat. 

At what point does the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere become a pollutant?

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

when al gore pronounces it so!  its like a papal dispensation

[Nitrogen]

At what point does the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere become a pollutant?

When the ability of photosynthesis is no longer able to keep balance with respiration.

Photosynthesis and cellular respiration are both balanced processes, and for quite a long time the output of one was able to balance the other.  That stopped sometime in the 18th century.

Also, Photosynthesis will increase (light intensity, amount of CO2 and Temperature) until limited by factors that I probably learned in Biology but can't remember and will have to look up.  The point being is that it's not an infinite curve; it does flatten out. 

[dm1333]

When the ability of photosynthesis is no longer able to keep balance with respiration.

Photosynthesis and cellular respiration are both balanced processes, and for quite a long time the output of one was able to balance the other.  That stopped sometime in the 18th century.

Also, Photosynthesis will increase (light intensity, amount of CO2 and Temperature) until limited by factors that I probably learned in Biology but can't remember and will have to look up.  The point being is that it's not an infinite curve; it does flatten out. 

This is a much better explanation than mine would have been.

[RocketMan]

None of your explanation accounts for the variations in the substantial CO2 contributions to the atmosphere from natural, non-biological sources.  In essence, that negates your entire thesis.

[RevDisk]

Al Gore would be a lot more popular if he was trying to do something like cleaning up the garbage patch instead of trying to push a policy that is an acknowledged failure in places where it has already been tried.

Except there is no money to be made in cleaning up the garbage patch.  


Few if any people are against sane pollution controls.  Preferring folks not dump dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls, etc into the water is perfectly understandable.  Hell, if folks were aware of what coal plants crank out in hard rads, uranium and thorium, they might be a bit more willing to embrace nuclear power plants.  Nothing wrong with requiring people to dispose of their waste responsibly and not needlessly wasting our resources.

But let's be honest.  The folks that actually care about the environment, do not have significant ulterior motives and possess any type of scientific/educated background are very, very rare.  Folks that advocate mass usage of solar panels are unaware of the very limited power they can produce and completely unaware of the manufacturing byproducts involved.  Folks that rant against modern agriculture are unaware that they'd sentence at least 1.7 billion people to death if successful.  etc, etc.  Very few "true" environmentalists want to actually protect the environment without killing billions of humans or reducing us to the Stone Ages.

A very significant number of environmentalists are interested making a buck via scams, misinformation or flatout gunpoint.  Another significant number of environmentalists are just flat out anti-capitalists, anti-modern Luddites, etc.  

Al Gore.  Whether or not he is sincere is entirely secondary to the fact that he wants to enforce his views and forcibly take money from a large number of people at literal gunpoint.  It would be one thing if his views were backed with decades of hard science and provable, repeatable and heavily scrutinized results with clear published procedures and data.  This is not an unreasonable demand.  Virtually every branch of science demands such.  Why should climate change be any different?  

He may or may not be correct.  That is not the point.  The point is he wishes to transfer large sums of money from other people to himself at gunpoint.  That should require very, very good reason.  Which he flat out doesn't currently have.  I don't care whether you believe he is right or wrong.  No one yet has enough conclusive proof one way or the other and unfortunately with a cross between politics and often incompetent data collection, we are unlikely to GET conclusive proof because few folks on BOTH side seem to actually want it.  

If you really want to save the environment, go get an engineering degree and build real technology that is more efficient.  Go build a better chemical process that is more efficient, more profitable and reduces waste.  Reducing CO2 at gunpoint would be roughly one thousands of a single percent as efficient as making it actually profitable to reduce CO2 through greater efficiency or superior technology.  By actually profitable, I mean in a real economic way, not through government subsidies, threats of violence or other coercion that are the preferred tools of the most environmentalists.

[Nitrogen]

None of your explanation accounts for the variations in the substantial CO2 contributions to the atmosphere from natural, non-biological sources.  In essence, that negates your entire thesis.

Non biological sources like what, volcanoes?  Not really.  Volcanoes emit about 130 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.  We're emitting about 30 billion tons a year.

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

really?

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba256

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html


though the lady from east anglia does say

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/06/how-much-of-the-recent-cosub2sub-increase-is-due-to-human-activities/


i haven't researched vis a vis the lil email contretemps yet.  what am i gonna find?

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

then there is this

One of the groups that undertook the task was in New York, funded by NASA and led by James Hansen. They understood that the work by Mitchell and others mainly described the Northern Hemisphere, since that was where the great majority of reliable observations lay. Sorting through the more limited temperature observations from the other half of the world, they got reasonable averages by applying the same mathematical methods that they had used to get average numbers in their computer models of climate. (After all, Hansen remarked, when he studied other planets he might judge the entire planet by the single station where a probe had landed.)

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm


rather long historic piece  good reading

[dm1333]

RevDisk,

If you are going to quote what I said in the post about Al Gore and the article I linked you should also be fair and quote what I said a few posts after.

I meant to write useful.  My bad.

As for most of the rest of your post?  Prove it!  This thread is about Al Gore, you are getting off topic and into the weeds with some of your statements.

The folks that actually care about the environment, do not have significant ulterior motives and possess any type of scientific/educated background are very, very rare.

Folks that advocate mass usage of solar panels are unaware of the very limited power they can produce and completely unaware of the manufacturing byproducts involved.

These are two good examples.  No way to prove or disprove these statements but it sure does whip up emotion in the reader.

Folks that rant against modern agriculture are unaware that they'd sentence at least 1.7 billion people to death if successful.  etc, etc.

Got a link for that?  My point is that this is the same type of emotional argument that people here accuse environmentalists of using, long on hype and short on fact. 

[HankB]

. . . Al Gore.  Whether or not he is sincere is entirely secondary to the fact that he wants to enforce his views and forcibly take money from a large number of people at literal gunpoint . . . He may or may not be correct.  That is not the point.  The point is he wishes to transfer large sums of money from other people to himself at gunpoint.

If Al Gore were sincere about the environment, he'd show it by changing his own lifestyle.

* His primary residence would not use 20x the energy that the average home uses.

* He would have one home, rather than four. (That's at least four.)

* He would fly via commercial, rather than corporate/private, jets.

* He surface travel would be in a single vehicle, rather than via caravan or motorcade.

Talk is cheap - actions speak louder than words. When Algore speaks, IMHO the truth is not in him.

[roo_ster]

dm1333:

I have posted a couple times about Norman Borlaug, the man behind the "green revolution" (golden rice, dwarf wheat) in the third world that saved 1B+ humans.

His work is the sort of thing the greenies whine about.  Absent Borlaug's work, yes, in excess of 1B more people would have starved to death in the last three or four decades.

Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009)[1]  was an American agronomist, humanitarian, and Nobel laureate who has been deemed the father of the Green Revolution.[2]  Borlaug was one of only six people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.[3]  He was also a recipient of the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honour.

"...some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western  nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things".

Algore got a Nobel, too, but his was less to do with hybridization and more to do with fertilizer.  Bullshit, to be specific.

[dm1333]

dm1333:

I have posted a couple times about Norman Borlaug, the man behind the "green revolution" (golden rice, dwarf wheat) in the third world that saved 1B+ humans.

His work is the sort of thing the greenies whine about.  Absent Borlaug's work, yes, in excess of 1B more people would have starved to death in the last three or four decades.

jfruser,

I'm not defending Al Gore.  Hank B said some things that I've said in person and I've also mentioned on the internet that when environmentalists start talking about cap and trade I put one hand on my wallet and the other on the family jewels.  My main point about this thread has already been stated once.

My point is that this is the same type of emotional argument that people here accuse environmentalists of using, long on hype and short on fact. 

I'm sure you have heard people on this forum say that environmentalism is a religion to the left, and that the left argues based on emotion and not fact.  We should not be doing the same thing when we oppose things like cap and trade or make arguments against what Al Gore is doing.  Here are some examples just from this thread.

quote]
A very significant number of environmentalists are interested making a buck via scams, misinformation or flatout gunpoint.  Another significant number of environmentalists are just flat out anti-capitalists, anti-modern Luddites, etc.  [/quote]

"The problem is that the same people who cry out CLIMATE IS NOT WEATHER today are the same people who had no problem referring to unusually hot weather last year as evidence of climate change."

"Al Gore.  Whether or not he is sincere is entirely secondary to the fact that he wants to enforce his views and forcibly take money from a large number of people at literal gunpoint. "

"(Yes, and please cue the apologists to say: Climate isn't weather!!!1111) "

I'm going to end this post now because my computer screen is scrolling up and down uncontrollaby as I type and it is driving me crazy.
 
 
 

[PTK]

I will guess that you don't want to eliminate all of the CO2, just the excess.  The excess is what helps the plants grow bigger, as it gives them more food.  And like  humans, the plants grow bigger when they have more food to eat.  

At what point does the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere become a pollutant?

The atmosphere currently has CO2 as a trace gas at ~0.038%, while it doesn't become toxic until nearly 5%. Read that again - that's a BIG gap.

EDIT: I saw this graph and just had to add it...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Atmosphere_gas_proportions.svg

[darius]

It is about time that some MSM started to notice that Gore is spouting a lot of BS.


Gore still hot on his doomsday rhetoric
By Jeff Jacoby
Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/03/03/gore_still_hot_on_his_doomsday_rhetoric/

THE CASE for global-warming alarmism is melting faster than those mythical disappearing Himalayan glaciers, but Al Gore isn’t backing down.

In a long op-ed piece for The New York Times the other day, Gore cranked up the doomsday rhetoric. Human beings, he warned, “face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.’’ His 1,900-word essay made no mention of his financial interest in promoting such measures - Gore has invested heavily in carbon-offset markets, electric vehicles, and other ventures that would profit handsomely from legislation curbing the use of fossil fuels, and is reportedly poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire.’’ However, he did mention “global-warming pollution’’ no fewer than four times, declaring that “our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation’’ if we don’t move decisively to reduce it.

By “global-warming pollution,’’ Gore means carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a “pollutant’’ in roughly the way oxygen and water are pollutants: Human existence would be impossible without them. CO2 is essential to photosynthesis, the process that sustains plant life and generates the oxygen that human beings and animals inhale. Far from polluting the world, carbon dioxide enriches it. Higher levels of CO2 are associated with larger crop yields, increased forest growth, and longer growing seasons - in short, with a greener planet.
Of course carbon dioxide also contributes to the greenhouse effect that keeps the earth warm. But the vast majority of atmospheric CO2 occurs naturally, and it is far from clear that the carbon dioxide contributed by human industry has a significant impact on the world’s climate.

On the other hand, it is quite clear that the economic and agricultural activity responsible for that anthropogenic CO2 has been enormously beneficial to myriads of men, women, and children. In just the last two decades, life expectancy in developing nations has climbed appreciably and infant mortality has fallen. Hundreds of millions of Indian and Chinese citizens have been lifted out of poverty. Whatever else might be said about carbon dioxide, it has helped make possible a dramatic increase in the quality of many human lives.

But there is no awareness of such tradeoffs in Gore’s latest screed. He brushes aside as unimportant the recently exposed blunders in the 2007 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These include claims that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, that global warming could slash African crop yields by 50 percent, and that 55 percent of the Netherlands - more than twice the correct amount - is below sea level.

Gore seems equally untroubled by Climategate, the scandal involving researchers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, who apparently schemed to manipulate temperature data, to prevent their critics from being published in peer-reviewed journals, and to destroy records and calculations to keep climate skeptics from double-checking them.

Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s errors and the Climatic Research Unit scandal have triggered major investigations, and opinion polls show a falloff in the percentage of the public that believes either global warming is cause for serious concern or that scientists see eye to eye on the issue. Yet Gore insists, against all evidence, that “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.’’

To climate alarmists like Gore, everything proves their point. For years they argued that global warming would mean a decline in snow cover and shorter ski seasons. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’’ one climate scientist lamented to reporters in 2000. The IPCC itself was clear that climate change was resulting in more rain and less snow.

Undaunted, Gore now claims that the blizzards that have walloped the Northeast in recent weeks are also proof of global warming. “Climate change causes more frequent and severe snowstorms,’’ he posted on his blog last month.

Gore is a True Believer; his climate hyperbole is less a matter of science than of faith. In almost messianic terms, he urges Congress to sharply restrain Americans’ access to energy. “What is at stake,’’ he writes, “is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.’’

But while Gore prays for redemption, the pews in the Church of Climate Catastrophe are gradually emptying. The public’s skeptical common sense, it turns out, is pretty robust. Just like those Himalayan glaciers.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Gore is a has been trying to keep his face in the news.

[Headless Thompson Gunner]

I'm sure you have heard people on this forum say that environmentalism is a religion to the left, and that the left argues based on emotion and not fact.  We should not be doing the same thing when we oppose things like cap and trade or make arguments against what Al Gore is doing.  Here are some examples just from this thread.


"A very significant number of environmentalists are interested making a buck via scams, misinformation or flatout gunpoint.  Another significant number of environmentalists are just flat out anti-capitalists, anti-modern Luddites, etc.  

"The problem is that the same people who cry out CLIMATE IS NOT WEATHER today are the same people who had no problem referring to unusually hot weather last year as evidence of climate change."

"Al Gore.  Whether or not he is sincere is entirely secondary to the fact that he wants to enforce his views and forcibly take money from a large number of people at literal gunpoint. "

"(Yes, and please cue the apologists to say: Climate isn't weather!!!1111) "

I'm going to end this post now because my computer screen is scrolling up and down uncontrollaby as I type and it is driving me crazy.
 
  

I'm not sure I understand you.  Were all of those quotes you listed supposed to be examples of "arguing emotionally and not from fact"?  Cause those quotes all seem to be examples of reasoning and critical thinking, albeit informal in their presentation.  (Well, maybe not that last one, but that wasn't really an argument at all.)

An example of arguing with emotion and not fact would be something like this graphic:

I'm referencing the imagery here, not the movie.  That pic was specifically tailored to play on peoples' emotions at a time when Katrina was still fresh in mind, and to imply that our industry was going to cause the destruction of whole cities due to new violence in the weather.

[darius]

CO2 is not a pollutant. 

It can be in high concentrations, but we normally don't think of it being one in the atmosphere.