Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
(
)
Date: December 12, 2019 12:25AM
LOL. This is the third thread (that I recall) in as many weeks that has born on the topic of climate change. MacaRomney has seen fit to weigh in on all three of them. He apparently thinks he has something Very Important to share.
Maca, you already have a firmly established, entrenched even, reputation for being obstinately ignorant about how radiometric dating works. Regardless how often people try to educate you, you come back spouting the same nonsense when the subject comes up again. You are not stating opinions. You are making statements that simply are not true.
Note to admins before I go on. RFM has traditionally been willing to allow discussion on climate change. While i can't speak to your reasons for doing that, I think it is useful because it is about the fundamental issue of how are facts determined.
This is highly relevant in the Mormon context, because Mormons have been trained to ignore/deny/"refute" facts, regardless of how well established. No, the earth is not 7,000 years old, we don't care what God told JS. No, the American First Nations did not come here in 600 BCE from Jerusalem. Just no.
So, how are facts established is a skill some Mormons desperately need help with. I hope admins will continue to let climate change be a topic of discussion here. I understand editorial whacks over the head when it starts chewing up too much space, but it is a useful real-time case of people coming to accept facts. Most people have come around to the position that something certainly appears to be happening, even if they disagree on exactly how bad it is.
The few hard core denialists, like Maca, are starting to sound like the moon landing deniers. "It was all faked because NASA was afraid its budget would be cut if they didn't land on the moon." I suppose we should be impressed that the 400,000 employees of NASA were able to keep a secret for 50 plus years now, and that those who figured out it was faked because they noticed the shadows were wrong on a photo were Truly Brilliant. [eyes roll]
Pardon my digression. Back to the subject at hand. I'll keep this short (for me) and simple. Yes, we only have recorded worldwide temperatures for about 140 years. There are other ways to estimate temperatures before that time. While not as precise as actual thermometer readings, they are still pretty good. I won't go into the gory details now.
The most recent ice age, which we are technically still in, started about a million years ago. There have been a number of warmer and colder spells in this ice age. They correlate basically exactly with rising and falling CO2 levels in the atmosphere. We can measure the CO2 levels in glacial ice cores, going back about 800,000 years. Farther back than that, the ice layers are so smooshed (technical term :) that they are difficult to date, but 800,000 years is still plenty of data.
The CO2 levels have consistency swung between 170 parts per million (ppm) in the cold periods to 270 ppm in the warm periods. A few centuries ago it was in the 270 ppm range. With the Industrial Revolution, we began pumping gigatonnes of CO2 into the air each year, and have quite accurately measured the rise. It is now above 400 ppm, and nobody reading this now will ever see it below 400 ppm during the rest of their lifetime.
We may not know exactly what that is going to do to the climate, but I'm pretty sure that "it will have no effect" isn't correct. It is dissolving in the ocean, acidifying it. Acidi water dissolves calcium carbonate, releasing in the process, you guessed it, more CO2. Ouch. It is also a greenhouse gas, which lets light through, but traps infrared radiation from the ground, which is to say, it traps heat.
Warmer oceans expand, and warmer ice melts and runs into the ocean, also raising water levels. It is a slow, but inexorable process (I almost never get to write "inexorable")
And thirdly, warmer temps melt permafrost, which contains copious amounts of CO2, and methane, an even worse greenhouse gas.
A bit of history. CO2 was first described in the mid 17th century, and more was found out about it in the 18th century. By 1804, scientists began discovering that it was a greenhouse gas, though that term was not used for another hundred years. Thomas Jefferson was president in 1804, just to give you a frame of reference. One of the discoverers was Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, who was studying heat transfer. He developed a mathematical transform algorithm for analyzing frequency data in a signal, which is today known as the Fourier Transform. It's what makes MP3s possible. If you've ever wondered how it is possible to shrink a WAV file by 90% when converting it to an MP3, and still have enough information to recreate, pretty closely, the original, the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) is the trick, and even when you know how it works, it is a gob-smacking bit of mathematical sorcery.
A couple links for further reading (if you really want to get into the weeds, there is a ton of stuff out there, but this is a good start):
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxideSomewhat to my surprise, NOAA still has this excellent web page about climate and CO2.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opinion/sunday/science-climate-change.htmlThis is an article from a month ago about how the predictions of climate scientists have been pretty consistently underestimating the actual changes in the climate.
Whew.