[Bored chemist]

Though I remember having to play rugby early in the season when the summer dressing of minced pigshit hadn't all dispersed from the school fields.....very character-building, stuff of empire, etc..

I will take that as a "no".
The same principle applies (to a greater or lesser extent) to all pollution.
It's a good idea to do less of it.

[alancalverd]

Pollution, as defined by Bertrand Russell, is "stuff in the wrong place".   A diet of minced pigshit and other mysterious substances had certainly produced an excellent playing surface over the course of the last 100 years, so it was in the right place but we were there at the wrong time.

Old Oxbridge tale:

Tourist: "How do you get the lawn to look like that?"

Gardener; "You mows it and you rolls it, and every 200 years...."

[Bored chemist]

Pollution, as defined by Bertrand Russell, is "stuff in the wrong place".

Not  a bad working definition.

The atmosphere is the wrong place for all the CO2 we have dumped into it.

[alancalverd]

Au contraire, that's where it came from in the first place.

[Bored chemist]

Not at any point hen humans were trying to live here.

[alancalverd]

Humans are a mere blip in evolution, but AFAIK there is no reason why we couldn't live in a repeat of the carboniferous period.

[Bored chemist]

Humans are a mere blip in evolution, but AFAIK there is no reason why we couldn't live in a repeat of the carboniferous period.

We usually consider ourselves to be an important blip- that's the whole tenet of this thread.

It's likely that we could survive in the carboniferous.
What we wouldn't survive is a rapid shift from the current climate to that of the carboniferous.
So, why raise that straw man?
Is it because you haven't a valid argument to use?

[alancalverd]

The Warmists generally argue in favour of an impending shift that will be too rapid for society to accommodate. How else can they get funding, other than by raising an alarm? Generally increased crop yields and the opening of the Northwest Passage won't lead to posh conferences and PhDs, but the devastation of island communities and the extinction of the polar bear will keep the cash registers ringing.

So if they are right (and HM tax collector can't afford for them to be wrong!) we are going to have to live in a carboniferous environment by 2016, or maybe 2030, or sometime....

[jeffreyH]

I'd like to see how the fauna and flora are going to adapt to such a radical change. We don't really know how things are going to turn out.

[Bored chemist]

The Warmists generally argue in favour of an impending shift that will be too rapid for society to accommodate.

So does the data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T_comp_61-90.pdf

[alancalverd]

Other flora and fauna just move to higher ground/cooler climates/wetter/drier places or whatever. Humans starve or kill each other rather than migrate. That's why we are a temporary blip on evolution.

[Bored chemist]

Other flora and fauna just move to higher ground/cooler climates/wetter/drier places or whatever. Humans starve or kill each other rather than migrate. That's why we are a temporary blip on evolution.

Well, it's just as well that some of us are trying to prevent the problem.
Fortunately most people wouldn't want to obstruct that goal.

[alancalverd]

I have proposed a perfectly straightforward, zero cost, zero risk experiment to test the hypothesis of CO2 forcing and make an immediate impact on the problem. The experiment has been supported by the World Bank, the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation, and HM Treasury, to name but a few sensible people who have studied it. But it won't happen because it is zero cost and might just prove fatal to several careers in politics and climate scaremongering.

[Bored chemist]

I have proposed a perfectly straightforward, zero cost, zero risk experiment to test the hypothesis of CO2 forcing and make an immediate impact on the problem. The experiment has been supported by the World Bank, the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organisation, and HM Treasury, to name but a few sensible people who have studied it. But it won't happen because it is zero cost and might just prove fatal to several careers in politics and climate scaremongering.

I may regret this but...
What's the experiment?

[alancalverd]

Farm animals are a major source of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Estimates vary from 18% of all anthro-CO2 (UNFAO) to over 50% (Goodall & Anfang, World Bank), depending on whether you measure animal exhalate only or factor in the fossil fuels used in farming, processing, storing, distributing and cooking meat, plus the opportunity cost of carbon sequestration in vegetable substitutes. My own estimate was 25% (Physics World 18, 7 (2005)) based purely on animal metabolic rates but, in retrospect, possibly overestimating the number of live chickens - 20% may be a better figure for "raw exhalate".

As any vegetarian will tell you, these animals are entirely unnecessary to human existence. A few small tribes can only survive by herding wild animals, but the vast majority of us could get all the nutrition we need directly from plants.

So the simple experiment is to eliminate farmed meat from our diet for as long as the Warmists say it will take to have a noticeable effect on climate, and see if it does. We can preserve breeding stock and repopulate the meat farms within 5 years if we don't like the result.

Who we? Everyone. So this has to be a truly intergovernmental policy, which is one reason why it won't happen. The other is that there is too much political capital and taxpayers' money already invested in not investigating the question: no signatory to Kyoto, Paris, Copenhagen  or any other meaningless protocol can afford a negative outcome of the experiment.

So in answer to the original question, I don't think science can prevent climate change but it can certainly investigate one supposed cause (and I'd be happy to be proved wrong), but the investigation will never take place (in case I'm right).

[jeffreyH]

And if there was sod all effect after the experiment they would be forced into investigating another cause. One which is much harder to monetise.

[Bored chemist]

simple experiment is to eliminate farmed meat from our diet

Conceptually, that's a simple experiment.
However, it's impossible.

Also, you called it " zero cost ".
How are you going to compensate the meat farmers without incurring costs?

Do you have any ideas that would actually work?

[noplaneta4]

Combating a warming world requires a portfolio of strategies, including exploring innovative new approaches to apply science and engineering, according to a new report from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). The report warns that focusing solely on reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is too inflexible and politically unrealistic.
If combating potentially harmful global warming requires substantially reducing CO2 emissions, then we will likely lose the fight, said Pete Geddes, executive vice president of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment and an NCPA adjunct scholar who authored the report. We need to begin treating the illness, and stop focusing all our energies on the underlying cause or debating its origin.

CO2, a potent greenhouse gas, helps warm the planet. Recently, the burning of fossil fuels has pushed atmospheric levels of CO2 from approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) at the start of the Industrial Revolution to approximately 380 ppm today. Over the next few decades CO2 levels will continue to increase.

This worries scientists who argue that increasing CO2 emissions are raising global temperatures substantially and later in the century could result in a variety of problems, including rising sea levels and the spread of tropical diseases.

Worse still, there is a small possibility of abrupt and catastrophic change over one or two decades, including the sudden disintegration of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, causing a rapid, many-meter rise in sea levels.

Yet according to the NCPA report, this would happen over too short a time to reduce the damage through CO2 emissions reductions, particularly with the prospect of increasing energy use in the developing world over the next 50 years.

In 1992 the National Academy of Sciences recommended three geoengineering options worth exploring: reforestation, directly screening out some sunlight and increasing ocean absorption of CO2.

-- Reforestation. Through photosynthesis, trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere, thus reforestation (and reduced deforestation) can play an important role in offsetting carbon emissions. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates reforestation could remove the carbon equivalent to about 10 percent to 20 percent of projected fossil fuel emissions by 2050.

-- Atmospheric Sun Screens. Volcanic eruptions that release massive amounts of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere provide a natural cooling effect, because SO2 eventually turns into highly reflective solid particles that bounce solar radiation back into space. One proposal to mimic this effect would be to increase the planets reflectivity by putting tiny particles of silicon dioxide (basically, kitty litter) into the stratosphere.

Other proposals to reduce the solar radiation reaching the Earth include putting a large mirror or shade into orbit between the Sun and the Earth, or placing trillions of small transparent sheets in orbit to reduce the sunlight reaching the Earths surface by 2 percent (sufficient to offset warming even with a doubling of CO2), or laying a reflective film over much of the planets deserts.

-- Ocean Absorption. A third idea is to add iron to the upper layers of the ocean. Iron acts as a fertilizer, increasing the growth of phytoplankton which, like all plants, creates carbon compounds by removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The resulting algal blooms, when they sink, would take carbon to the sea floor, essentially storing it away.

If we are to truly fix our climate, we cannot dismiss these options out-of-hand, said Geddes. Its time to think outside our soapbox.