Eric

(Re-asking, since I thinko'd and typed feet when I meant inches; my mistake, sigh)

I'm genuinely baffled by this. In a recent question, one of YA's prolific deniers mocks another answer which claims sea level in the SF Bay has risen 8 inches in a century. That answerer said:

"The sea level at the Golden Gate has been carefully measured for about 160 years. Sea levels have increased by 8 inches since 1900. Sea level not only are increasing in the long term but change year to year. They are higher in the Pacific in El Nino years than in La Nina years. If you took careful you could probably see it, but has you know it varies hour by hour and day by day depending on tides and weather.

Here is a background on the Golden Gate monitoring in a pdf if you are interested

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/topics/navops/ports/s... "

Reading that PDF, it does indeed say "As measured at San Francisco, the ocean level has been rising at the rate of 2.13 millimeters a year, or over eight inches per century."

In righteous reply, the denier said:

"[his] answer is again completely wrong and seems to fly in the face of the actual IPCC and Royal Society with his sea level alarmism... The religious Global Warming sea level alarmism is nothing more than people trying scare people with biblical like stories. The Royal Society actually say that....

"Because of the thermal expansion of the ocean, it is very likely that for many centuries the rate of global sea-level rise will be at least as large as the rate of 20 cm per century that has been observed over the past century. ...""

(he then goes on to cut and paste stock information on oceans from Wikipedia w/o reference)

So this was the Ah-Hah, the Gotcha, the ZING!, the boo-ya! moment. To the silly answerer who asserted that NOAA says sea levels have risen 8 inches (which they did, in fact, say), proof of falsehood was offered in form of vaunted Royal Society literature, claiming... 20cm sea level rise in a century.

How much is 20cm? Just shy of 8 inches. 7.87 inches.

And the Royal Society says what is causing it? Thermal expansion. i.e., warmer oceans.

What is this, cognitive dissonance? Ignorance of the metric system? Is this indicative of the deniers' grasp of the issues, or is this just an outlier?

Why do we get these weirdly-phrased questions every day? I'd say it's spam, but there are no links. Who keeps asking these questions and why? New accounts keep getting created and a rapid-fire series of these "questions" ensues. There must be an angle somewhere. :)

SO2 (acid rain) was controlled by a cap and trade program.

The Clean Air Mercury Rule, built on EPA’s Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR), institutes a cap and trade program for mercury emissions from coal plants (currently capped at 38 tons of mercury annually).

Are/were there others? Are/were they successful? Is/was the cost too much to bear given the (projected) outcome? Are there estimates of ultimate cost to the end-user? Did wall street get rich off these trading plans?

http://www.epa.gov/CAMR/basic.htm

http://www.epa.gov/airmarkets/trading/factsheet.ht...

Are these born of the same traits or biases? I was thinking about skepticism towards climate science, and skepticism about vaccines. Many people in both groups seem to:

* mistrust science

* mistrust authorities in the field of study

* appeal to conspiracy theories

* make heavy use of anecdotal evidence

* misunderstand relevant statistics

* discount scientific consensus and large-scale studies

* put short-term/personal concerns above long-term/societal welfare

What do you think, same basic behavior & attitude, or is one group on firmer ground?

The idea of capping CO2 outputs is resisted by many people for many reasons, but one of the main obstacles maybe how innocuous it seems - can't see it, taste it, smell it ... and "I expel CO2 every time I breathe!" ...

Focusing on CO2 might be a dead end with some. What about raising the profile of the other detrimental effects of digging up and burning 1000s of trainloads of coal each day?

Take for example the waste product, coal ash,

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Devas...

http://www.jhenryfair.com/coalash/index3.html

http://www.jhenryfair.com/coalash/index5.html

which is highly toxic and darned unsightly anyway; it's pretty hard to look at these photographs and not think "Hm, maybe this can't go on forever."

I think it'd be interesting to collect a list of high-profile or influential climate skeptics who have changed their mind on the subject. For bonus points, what caused them to change their mind.

I have a couple:

Bjørn Lomborg:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/30/...

Vladimir Putin:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67M3G9201008...

(for that matter, any readers who were "low-profile" skeptics and changed your mind, you can chime in too) :)

Germany for instance has invested heavily in solar over the past several years. US wind capacity is growing fairly steadily.

So, has investment in renewables or conservation/efficiency measures caused any significant reduction in CO2 output for any industrialized country?

It's a little hard to disentangle from the drop due to the global recession, but I'm still curious if there has been measurable progress made anywhere.

OT rants will be mercilessly ranked down. :)

How do you, personally, rate the percentage likelihood of these things:

A) The earth has seen an overall warming trend over the last 200 years

If you rank A) greater than 0%, then also:

B) That this warming is primarily due to human activities, and

C) That this warming (from whatever reason) will cause significant problems for humans in the next century (this one is vaguer, rolled into it is whether we can do anything about it if B) is true)

I really don't want a discussion of Al Gore, Taxes, Malthus, Water Vapor, Gaia, liberal fantasies, or whether it snowed in your town yesterday. I just wonder where the people who frequent YA stand with the certainty of their views.

I'll go first:

A) Earth is warming: 100%

and so:

B) It's our doing: 80%

C) It's gonna be a big problem: 70%

All I really want is those 3 numbers, and because it is, in the end, a personal opinion there will be no "best answer" selected by me.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&client=firefox-a...

We got 2 dry runs at atmopheric problems in the past - Acid rain due to SO2 emissions, and the ozone problem due to CFCs.

In both cases, the public and governments recognized the problem, listened to the scientists, and arrived at a solution. The solutions even cost money, and caused some minor changes in people's lifestyles.

The Acid Rain problem was largely solved in the US by a cap and trade program (!) at a cost in the billions.

The CFC problem required international cooperation to ban the harmful substances; in some cases switching to somewhat inferior alternatives.

Granted, CO2 is a bigger problem, as it has a much more pervasive root cause. However, the question:

Why is it that a large section of the public and the government are fighting tooth and nail, by any means necessary, against any action on CO2 emissions, when related problems were solved in the past with less polarization?

I'm pretty sure the US (DOE? EPA? can't remember) estimates year-over-year CO2 output. Is there a similar tally for the world? Difficult at best, but still.

And to folks chomping at the bit for another AGW "debate," please refrain, unless you really want to argue that burning coal and oil does not release any CO2. Which isn't my question anyway. Thanks.

You can't improve what you don't measure, so grab that power bill. How much electricity did you use in the last few months, in what region, with how many people, with what appliances? Here's mine:

Upper midwest US home, about 1500 ft^2, 4 people, electric dryer, 2 refrigerators, electric range, no central AC.

June: 210 kWh

July: 399 kWh

August: 603 kWh

September: 362 kWh

October: 270 kWh

November: 363 kWh

December: 452 kWh

August spiked due to window AC units; Nov/Dec are up because I had to use the electric dryer.

Plenty of people on this category vehemently deny that there is any problem with climate change, or, as a fall-back position, that climate change is real but it's not our fault.

My question for them: Aside from CO2 (the effects of which do not concern you), do you see any value in developing cleaner and less intrusive energy sources such as solar or wind, or are you advocates of such technologies as mountain-top removal for coal production, and petroleum production from oil sands, full speed ahead?

The Intel mobile Atom processors N450 and N550 claim to support SpeedStep meaning the CPU can throttle back to a slower speed when idle to save energy. I'd like to know what frequency steps the N550 supports.

This can be seen in the scaling_available_frequencies file in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ on a linux computer.

For the N450, the frequencies are: 1666000 1333000 1000000 (1.66, 1.33, and 1.0 GHz)

I'm interested in the same information for the N550.