Old Rocks
Diamond Member
Let's say Hansen is right???? Let's give him the benefit of being right in this thread. We really do see warming at .25-.3c per decade all the way to 2100. What would you suggest us do? Let's say we get 3 to 4c warmer than today by 2100.
A few idea's
-Build sea walls around cities that are within 5 feet of sea level.
-Move cities, towns, etc to higher ground
-Work on toughing up grains, etc to sustain themselves through drought and flood
What else do we do?
Let's say Hansen's personal wealth depends on the continuation of the grand extortion scheme called "global warming. Let's be reasonable about it. Ice core samples indicate incredible shifts in global weather. We even number the ice ages. Do global warming scientists think the world was created in the late 1800's when the industrial revolution started? There are reasonable weather theories that indicate that the earth is emerging from a geological span of time that included an ice age. Ten thousand years is nothing in geological terms but modern scientists who depend on left wing funding can't seem to think in geological terms. Isn't it reasonable for the US to table the global warming argument for ten or twenty years while we fix the economy or is global warming more of a political issue than a geological one?
I think you just proved it's a political issue. The basic science is solid. We know the properties of CO2. We know the concentration has been going up. Put two and two together. The problem with discussing past cycles is, they're only valid if underlying conditions haven't changed. What's happening now is that humans put more CO2 into the atmosphere in days than all the volcanoes on earth do in a normal year. That hasn't happened before, so citing the past doesn't really tell us much.
Perhaps you don't realize that geological processes happen on multiple time scales. The Milankovic cycles operate on scales of tens of thousands of years. The variaton in in CO2, 180 to 300 ppm normally occurs on that scale. However, in the last 150 years, we have matched the increase that normally takes about 10 to 12 thousand years from glacial to interglacial. That is an increase of the normal rate of change of about 4 orders of magnitude.
Now here on the West Coast the speed of subduction is about the same as the growth rate of your fingernails. And ever so often the stress hits the point that the subducting plate lurches 15 to 40 feet. Now suppose we increased the speed of the subduction by a factor of several thousand. How often would we get great quakes then?
We truly have little idea of what the total affects of increasing the GHGs at the rate we are will be. Already the melt of the Arctic Sea Ice has taken us by surprise. The affects on the jet stream were not predicted in advance, and we had no idea that the permafrost could melt as quickly as it is doing.
And what is already in the pipeline is going to occur, no matter what we do in the next decade.