[Craig W. Thomson]

You are trying to pretend that 1 is the same as 15000

You are trying to pretend applying combustion to 100 million years worth of fossil fuels, releasing 100 million years worth of stored solar energy, has insignificant consequences.

How much arsenic would it take to shut you up? I would be willing to bet less than 1 part in 15,000.

[Craig W. Thomson]

If observing that A always precedes B .... what name would you give to pretending that it doesn't?

"Flat Earth climate change skeptic."

[Bored chemist]

Since it's easy to check what I actually said, the real question now is whether you are a deliberate liar, or just too lazy to read.

There's another explanation. I got my trolls mixed up. You sound just like all the other flat earth climate skeptics to me.

Maybe you're just trying to make me angry by calling me a lazy liar. You can insult me all you like. The simple fact is, I am concerned about humanity, that's the only reason climate change is important to me.

And you're fighting me on that ...

No.
I'm not fighting you. I support the idea that people are causing global warming.
You want to convince people of the truth of your belief.
I'm just pointing out that you won't do that by saying things that are obviously not true.
You undermine the credibility of your view by doing so.

And I'd much rather you stopped doing it.
The reality is that  the direct heating effect of burning fossil fuel is tiny.
and the global warming is due to CO2


So, for example you misstate my views by saying "You are trying to pretend applying combustion to 100 million years worth of fossil fuels, releasing 100 million years worth of stored solar energy, has insignificant consequences."
 whereas in fact I think the effects are significant- but not because of the direct effect of heating, but because we dumped zillions of tons of CO2 into the air.
And, since my views are clear enough for all to see, it must be a lack of care, or a lack of honesty on your part that makes you misrepresent them.

if you think that sounds "just like all the other flat earth climate skeptics to me." then you need to clean your ears out.

The answer toy your silly question is that it would take roughly 1 in 80,000 of my weight in arsenic to kill me- unless I had the sense to consume it slowly enough.
But that's not the relevant question is it?
The relevant question is
"would raising the amount of arsenic that is currently present in your body by 1 part in 15000 make any difference to you?"
And the answer is no- of course not. I probably raise it  by more than that every time I have a tuna sandwich.

Why would anyone care?

[JoeBrown]

If observing that A always precedes B .... what name would you give to pretending that it doesn't?

"Flat Earth climate change skeptic."

I declare Craig the winner.  He's most successfully ground to argument down to nothing.

[Craig W. Thomson]

So, for example you misstate my views by saying "You are trying to pretend applying combustion to 100 million years worth of fossil fuels, releasing 100 million years worth of stored solar energy, has insignificant consequences."
 whereas in fact I think the effects are significant- but not because of the direct effect of heating, but because we dumped zillions of tons of CO2 into the air.
And, since my views are clear enough for all to see, it must be a lack of care, or a lack of honesty on your part that makes you misrepresent them.

I'm not misrepresenting your views. You are misrepresenting science's views. Sorry, mass/energy conversion is what it is. When you apply combustion to a log, that changes its mass. You get heat and carbon dioxide from that log AT THE SAME TIME. It's ALL part of the same process.

You are obfuscating the issue because you're misrepresenting the relationship between carbon dioxide and heat, BOTH of which are produced by combustion. BOTH of those come from a burning log, or a barrel of oil, or a pile of coal. The heating isn't the only thing "directly" dumped into the atmosphere when you burn things. Combustion DIRECTLY releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere AT THE SAME TIME that it dumps heat into the atmosphere.

When you add extra heat to the atmosphere, and at the same time add extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere helping it to retain that heat, the extra heat and extra insulation are NOT two separate, independent things. They BOTH came from the act of combustion, they are both a result of the mass/energy conversion that took place.

[Craig W. Thomson]

I declare Craig the winner.  He's most successfully ground to argument down to nothing.

Thanks. I tend to agree with scientists, that the simplest, most widely applicable theory is probably the correct one.

Nothing makes more sense to me than, "Burning stuff makes it hotter." Even cavemen figured that one out.

Now, we know something the cavemen didn't know. "The atmosphere is like a blanket."

So, applying that knowledge to observations, we have the basis for anthropogenic climate change theory: "Burning stuff creates warmth, and the atmosphere is like a blanket."

Hard to discredit a theory when you state it in the simplest terms like that.

Here's the twist: "Burning stuff makes the blanket work better." That's the extra carbon dioxide.

All together now, in ever so slighly more scientific terms: "Combustion produces heat and carbon dioxide, causing the temperature of the atmosphere to warm."

I honestly can't put it any more simply than that. It seems pretty silly to quibble about the details.

[Craig W. Thomson]

The answer toy your silly question is that it would take roughly 1 in 80,000 of my weight in arsenic to kill me- unless I had the sense to consume it slowly enough.

Yes, I see how you operate. You didn't know that. You Googled it so you could present a counter argument.

That's where you're getting ALL your arguments, not just the toy, silly ones. Google. You don't comprehensively understand climate change. You're looking facts up on the fly, copying and pasting information willy-nilly to support your claims, and have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

[Bored chemist]

So, for example you misstate my views by saying "You are trying to pretend applying combustion to 100 million years worth of fossil fuels, releasing 100 million years worth of stored solar energy, has insignificant consequences."
 whereas in fact I think the effects are significant- but not because of the direct effect of heating, but because we dumped zillions of tons of CO2 into the air.
And, since my views are clear enough for all to see, it must be a lack of care, or a lack of honesty on your part that makes you misrepresent them.

I'm not misrepresenting your views. You are misrepresenting science's views. Sorry, mass/energy conversion is what it is. When you apply combustion to a log, that changes its mass. You get heat and carbon dioxide from that log AT THE SAME TIME. It's ALL part of the same process.

You are obfuscating the issue because you're misrepresenting the relationship between carbon dioxide and heat, BOTH of which are produced by combustion. BOTH of those come from a burning log, or a barrel of oil, or a pile of coal. The heating isn't the only thing "directly" dumped into the atmosphere when you burn things. Combustion DIRECTLY releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere AT THE SAME TIME that it dumps heat into the atmosphere.

When you add extra heat to the atmosphere, and at the same time add extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere helping it to retain that heat, the extra heat and extra insulation are NOT two separate, independent things. They BOTH came from the act of combustion, they are both a result of the mass/energy conversion that took place.

I have always said all along that you get both heat and CO2.
So why do you bother to say "Combustion DIRECTLY releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere AT THE SAME TIME that it dumps heat into the atmosphere."?
It's not as if I or anyone else had said otherwise.

So, once again you are misrepresenting what I said.
One of them is much more significant in heating the world.
The mass change is tiny, irrelevant and, not actually applicable to the Earth as a whole.

Now,as it happens, I'm a chemist with a background in pharmacology and I have done some work in toxicology. I didn't need to look up the LD50 for arsenic because I know it's of the order of 13 ppm w/w.
But if you keep going on about blankets, perhaps you should admit that you got that analogy from somewhere. Have a look at post 114 in this thread.
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=47800.msg413680#msg413680


Re."I honestly can't put it any more simply than that. It seems pretty silly to quibble about the details."
No, and there's no reason why you should have done so.

More importantly, there's no reason why you should have described Tim's comment as false when it was true.
And that's been my point all along.
It doesn't help if you say stuff that is clearly wrong.
Don't say things like like you can heat a house with the energy from a few buckets of molten metal or that you can run a train on two horsepower or that the heat released by burning fossil fuel is a significant part of the heat budget or
"Oh, well, if you and a plumber say it's true, I suppose I should listen."
or "I'm really sick of skeptics controlling the conversation. "
or any of the other cobblers you came up with.
(I think the most bizarre one was "I haven't said anything "wrong." If you knew your science correctly, you would that. ". Try reading it carefully)

[jeffreyH]

Carbon dioxide isn't the problem. The real problem is that rises in temperature increase the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. Ultimately in an extreme situation the heat evaporates all the water. The climate would have to go very wrong for that to happen. This is the worse problem since water vapour is a very good greenhouse gas.

[Craig W. Thomson]

But if you keep going on about blankets, perhaps you should admit that you got that analogy from somewhere.

Yeah, Mrs. Pivik's 2nd grade class. Is there anything else you can nitpick at me about? Perhaps you would like to chastise me for not inventing English before speaking?

I took 8 hours of Biology in college, and 8 hours of Astronomy. You can barely hold your own in this conversation as a degreed chemist. That speaks volumes. Sorry, there's nothing about you that stands out compared to any other skeptic I've argued with, except maybe your use of the word "cobbler." THAT'S why I keep getting your comments mixed up with these other guys.

Sorry, I'm not taking climate science lessons from a pill salesman today, or ever. Pharmacologist, LOL. Like I said earlier in this thread, chemists don't even count the mass/energy conversion when they do experiments. They round off and disregard that change. That alone make you less of a physics guy than me. I don't believe for an instant that you are any more qualified to have this conversation than I am.

[Bored chemist]

Carbon dioxide isn't the problem. The real problem is that rises in temperature increase the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. Ultimately in an extreme situation the heat evaporates all the water. The climate would have to go very wrong for that to happen. This is the worse problem since water vapour is a very good greenhouse gas.

CO2 very definitely is the problem, because it's the thing that we are changing (and have been doing for a couple of centuries)
Water vapour just makes it worse.

Even you say "The climate would have to go very wrong for that to happen".
Well, if the climate change wasn't due to CO2 then there wouldn't be anything making it "go wrong" so there wouldn't be a problem.

Craig,
I was just pointing out that some of us know stuff without having to look it up on the web. (and also pointing out that I have been saying that CO2 is a problem for a long time).
For you to say "Yes, I see how you operate. You didn't know that. You Googled it so you could present a counter argument." was just flat out wrong
And, even if it had been substantially correct; so what?
Are people not allowed to use Google to find evidence?
Perhaps you should try it. That way you won't keep saying you can run a train on two horsepower or heat a whole houes with a 2 bare electric fire or even, that mankind's direct energy use is what's heating the planet.

[Craig W. Thomson]

That way you won't keep saying you can run a train on two horsepower or heat a whole houes with a 2 bare electric fire or even, that mankind's direct energy use is what's heating the planet.

Maybe you should lay off the pharmacy products. Applying combustion to 100 million years worth of fossil fuels ("direct energy use") warms the planet, even when you are wacked out of your mind on pills. And I have never even used the words "horsepower" or "bare electric fire." Purple haze all in your brain, voodoo child?

[Bored chemist]

But if you keep going on about blankets, perhaps you should admit that you got that analogy from somewhere.

Yeah, Mrs. Pivik's 2nd grade class. Is there anything else you can nitpick at me about? Perhaps you would like to chastise me for not inventing English before speaking?

I took 8 hours of Biology in college, and 8 hours of Astronomy. You can barely hold your own in this conversation as a degreed chemist. That speaks volumes. Sorry, there's nothing about you that stands out compared to any other skeptic I've argued with, except maybe your use of the word "cobbler." THAT'S why I keep getting your comments mixed up with these other guys.

Sorry, I'm not taking climate science lessons from a pill salesman today, or ever. Pharmacologist, LOL. Like I said earlier in this thread, chemists don't even count the mass/energy conversion when they do experiments. They round off and disregard that change. That alone make you less of a physics guy than me. I don't believe for an instant that you are any more qualified to have this conversation than I am.

OK once again. I'm on record saying (about climate change denial) that
"It's the equivalent (as I have said before) of having 3 blankets on the bed, adding a forth, and saying that you don't expect it to make any difference."

And yet you say
"Sorry, there's nothing about you that stands out compared to any other skeptic I've argued with, except maybe your use of the word "cobbler." THAT'S why I keep getting your comments mixed up with these other guys."

So you really think the other skeptics are saying that sort of thing?

And, not that it matters, actually you are wrong about the mass changes- for two reasons
as I pointed out before- it's taken account of in the definitions of relative atomic mass and
it doesn't matter because the mass is conserved overall- you just need to take proper account of the mass of the energy that's released too.

You say stuff like "I haven't said anything "wrong." If you knew your science correctly, you would that. "
and then say I'm the one not holding my own in this discussion.

Have you actually read what you have written?

(Incidentally, I didn't say "cobbler", I said "cobblers" -perhaps I should have said "cobblers'" because it's a possessive of a plural.
It's rhyming slang, and they generally come in pairs.)

It doesn't matter that you didn't say "horsepower" does it?
Nobody said you used the word.
What you said was that you can run a train on the power from 2 square metres' worth of sunlight That's about 2.7 Kw or about 3.6 Horsepower (oops, I got the conversion factor wrong earlier- big deal).

[Bored chemist]

That way you won't keep saying you can run a train on two horsepower or heat a whole houes with a 2 bare electric fire or even, that mankind's direct energy use is what's heating the planet.

Applying combustion to 100 million years worth of fossil fuels ("direct energy use") warms the planet, even when you are wacked out of your mind on pills.

Why even bother to say that?
It's not as if anyone said otherwise.
What we said was that the indirect heating is so much bigger that you don't even need to account for the tiny amount of direct heat.

[Tim the Plumber]

I start with your cliam that climate change has caused more tornadoes and find the data the says it is wrong. There have been less tornadoes.

Are you claiming that the way air moves has changed in order to maintain your confirmation bias?[/color]

That's not my claim, never has been. Why are climate skeptics so inclined to tell lies? Desperate to prove your case? You're misquoting me. What is changing is tornado season. Summer is getting longer. Winter is getting shorter. Tornado season is just shifting. And, just like I said earlier, temperatures are starting to affect circulation patterns, so while the number of tornadoes is going down, there are actually more tornadoes just outside tornado alley, in places like Colorado and Minnesota.

So are you claiming that there are more tornadoes?

Because there have been less.

I agree that the current climate is somewhat warmer than it was in 1979. That winter is somewhat shorter. You cliamed that this had lead to more tornadoes, which would be expected, but it has not.

[Tim the Plumber]

Well, saying things on a science that are wrong, even though you don't care if they are or not, is sowing discord.

I haven't said anything "wrong." If you knew your science correctly, you would that. You are the one sowing discord, along with "global moderator" alancalverd. Your confirmation biases and inability to accept empirical evidence is the problem. That is to say, neither of you operate according to the Scientific Method. You are nothing more than a couple of Flat Earthers. You might as well be burning me at the stake for being a witch.

Your claim that burning fossil fuels directly increases the temperature of the atmosphere to a degree beyond the 15,000th of the earth's energy budget is false.

This is clear from the numbers. Your inability to do numbers is astounding.

The hypothesis that increased CO2 causes increased temperatures is the idea of climate change/global warming etc.

Please stop posting drivel.

[Tim the Plumber]

Since it's easy to check what I actually said, the real question now is whether you are a deliberate liar, or just too lazy to read.

There's another explanation. I got my trolls mixed up. You sound just like all the other flat earth climate skeptics to me.

Maybe you're just trying to make me angry by calling me a lazy liar. You can insult me all you like. The simple fact is, I am concerned about humanity, that's the only reason climate change is important to me.

And you're fighting me on that ...

In order to do good it is necessary to understand stuff and then do hard work. It is often hard work to understand stuff.

Thinking in sound bites will result in the sort of bad science that was practiced in the 1920's in the Soviet Union where bad science caused the deaths of about 20 million people.

Posting lies, such as claiming to be a degree level chemist when you are not, will not help anybody.

[Tim the Plumber]

Carbon dioxide isn't the problem. The real problem is that rises in temperature increase the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. Ultimately in an extreme situation the heat evaporates all the water. The climate would have to go very wrong for that to happen. This is the worse problem since water vapour is a very good greenhouse gas.

Well, that's the additional heating the IPCC says will cause the heating beyond the direct effects of additional CO2 and much more than double the increased temperature.

But since for most of the earth's history it has been out of any ice age, such as the present one, with temperatures up to 20c higher than now without this runaway heating I do not think that there is any chance of us getting into a Venus II scenario.

[Craig W. Thomson]

Your claim that burning fossil fuels directly increases the temperature of the atmosphere to a degree beyond the 15,000th of the earth's energy budget is false.

This is clear from the numbers. Your inability to do numbers is astounding.

On the contrary, you're the one who seems to think applying combustion to a trillion tons of fossil fuels adds up to nothing. Go figure.

I've got news for you. It would be almost absolute zero on the planet's surface if there was no atmosphere. That's the context, that's the baseline for the 1/15,000 figure, not the limited 200 degree range of an insulated atmosphere. When 15,000/15,000 of solar energy is enough to make the earth habitable for life, then yes, taking that up to 15,001 or 15,002 by releasing previously stored solar energy CAN make a noticeable difference of a couple of degrees.

I'm fine with numbers. You sweep them under the rug.

[agyejy]

I've got news for you. It would be almost absolute zero on the planet's surface if there was no atmosphere.

I suggest you fact check that using google. The actual value is somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 Kelvin based on the thermal radiation from the Sun and Earth's current albedo.